Weird Michigan: 7 Stories We Couldn't Possibly Make Up

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From the downright weird department, a slobbering, not a clobbering, could lead to assault and battery charge:

In Milford, a man took a licking in a fight. No, really. After arguing about the storage of wood chips, a 56-year-old man allegedly licked the face of his girlfriend’s 27-year-old son “from his chin to his nose,” the police chief, Thomas Lindenberg said, adding the two have had conflicts in the past.
Police were asked to investigate after the son said the slobbering should be considered assault and battery. The police chief thinks the “Memorial Day picnic may not be comfortable over there.”

From the weird in the what-were-they-thinking department comes this perfectly awful pony tale:

Someone slipped into Elizabeth Park and snipped about two feet of hair from the tails of four pretty little ponies that are part of a popular attraction at the riverfront park. The ponies weren’t hurt, but it will take a year or so for their tails to grow back. Police don’t have any solid leads, but suspect the culprit might plan to sell the hair on the internet. They won’t make much — about $40 a pound, Police Chief Steven Voss said.
If caught, the culprit will face animal cruelty charges, which could mean up to four years in prison and a $5,000 fine per act — in this case, up to $20,000.
The ponies’ tail hair will grow back, but it will take about a year, police said.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Trenton Police Detective Bureau at (734) 676-3825.

From the weird in the we-love-this-so-much-we-can't-stand-it department, a Florida woman drove to Michigan to be reunited with her dog after he had been gone for two years.

Zeus, a pug-nosed terrier, had been gone from his owner in Florida for two years when he was picked up as a stray and taken to the Dearborn animal shelter. Fortunately, Debi Petranck, of Ocala, FL, had microchipped Zeus, and she was ecstatic when she learned the dog she’d never given up hope of finding had, indeed, been found.
How he came to be in Michigan is weird in itself. Some kids in Florida had found him and gave him away to a man they met at a fast food-restaurant, and he brought the dog home with him to Michigan.

From the weird in the how'd-that-work-out-for-you department, this bizarre incident illustrated how fierce competition is in Birmingham to buy a house:

The Birmingham housing market is so competitive, Real Estate One brokerage president Dan Elsea said at a recent Birmingham Bloomfield Chamber event, that a prospective buyer at an open house “barricaded himself in the home and wouldn’t open the door until he was told the seller actually looked at his offer.”
How did that work out for the guy? It didn't. His offer was rejected.

From the weird in the so-that’s-how-that-works department, an infant was placed on the FBI terror watch list before he could crawl:

A mother and her 7-month-old son were passing through security at Detroit Metropolitan Airport when they were pulled from line, detained and subjected to vigorous searches, including a chemical treatment of the boy, because one of their tickets included a special code used to alert security agents and airline personnel.
The code — SSS — tells them that the passenger has been listed on the government's Terrorist Screening Database, commonly known as "the watch list," which designates more than 1.5 million people, mostly Americans, as "suspected or known terrorists."
The woman's ticket had no such code. Her son's did. The United States government had designated this tiny boy, just beginning to crawl, a known or suspected terrorist.
A lawsuit over the list filed against the U.S. government cites the Detroit incident as just one of many that illustrate how haphazardly Americans have been secretly but officially tied to terrorism unknown to them and with no reviewable proof.

From the weird-in-a-political-way department — you might well ask, “What isn’t weird in this election cycle?”— a Michigan legal scholar believes President Obama would be on firm constitutional and legal ground if he appointed federal appeals Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court without waiting for the Senate to hold hearings:

University of Michigan Law School professor Richard Primus, who clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before joining the U-M faculty, wrote in an essay for Politico Magazine that the Senate’s silence on Garland’s nomination could be construed as implied consent, just as it is in other areas of the law.
"The Constitution doesn't actually say that the Senate needs to vote to confirm a judicial nominee," Primus wrote, only that appointments must be made “with the advice and sent of the Senate.”
Traditionally, that has meant the Senate votes up or down on a nominee.
“But voting on the nominee is just a convention — a shared understanding among the players in the game that we do things a certain way,” Primus wrote. “This is where the fragility of conventions comes into play. Just as there’s no rule that the Senate needs to consider the nominee quickly, there’s no clear reason why the Senate’s consent to a nomination must be signaled with an affirmative vote.”

Finally, the notorious international smuggler who stuffed 51 turtles in his pants was sentenced to 57 months in jail.

Yes, for those of you who are counting, that’s more than a month in prison for each turtle, though if you count all of the turtles Canadian Kai Xu, 27, is accused of smuggling — thousands, federal prosecutors said — he got off lightly.
Xu’s attorney argued his client isn’t the sophisticated smuggler prosecutors made him out to be. If he were more savvy, he would have found a better way than hiding them in his pants to conceal the turtles.
That was “not a good way to get them across the border,” the attorney, Matthew Borgula, said.

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