It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids

■ An artist is asking for $6,300 for an artwork in a New Zealand gallery consisting of a slice of pickle from a McDonald’s hamburger flung onto the ceiling. Matthew Griffin’s work Pickle, at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, is a deliberately “provocative gesture,” said his representative, Ryan Moore of Fine Arts in Sydney. The piece is “a sculptural gesture,” Moore said, which examines “the way value and meaning is generated between people.”

■ Belgian scientists are investigating a report that different styles of music affect the behavior of pigs. The study was inspired by farmer Piet Paesmans, who noted that his pigs grew animated when his son started singing in the barn during an insemination session. He began playing them a curated soundtrack, with energetic music when he wants them to be active and lullabies in the evening. “Jolly dance songs are the biggest hits,” he says. Rock music, though, “is too strong. They don’t like it.”

■ A Tunisian bride was jilted at the altar after her wouldbe mother-in-law protested that she was too short and unattractive for her son to marry. Prior to the ceremony, bride Lamia al-Labawi hadn’t met her groom’s mother, who had seen her only in pictures—and made her displeasure known when she met the genuine article, ordering her son to halt the service. He complied, departing with his mother, and leaving al-Labawi to say in an anguished Facebook post she’d been humiliated. One supporter wrote, “You did not lose a man. You lost whoever could be a curse in your life.”