FT258

SHEEP BOY
A 14-year-old boy has been found in a ramshackle sheep shed in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Doctors said he had been raised by the sheep for the last eight years. His parents left for Russia to seek work in early 2000, leaving the five-year-old with his ill grandmother. For reasons unknown, he began living with the sheep almost immed­iately. His plight came to light after his grandmother’s body was found in a river. Now in state care in Bishkek, he cannot speak or use a lavatory, and tears off socks and shoes nurses put on his feet. [RIA Novosti] D.Express, 6 Nov 2009.

IT’S BEHIND YOU!
Writing to the Northern Echo (24 Oct 2009), Christopher Wardell said: “Each time I visit the indoor market in Darlington town centre to buy meat and vegetables, I often get the strange feeling that I am being followed around by a horse. Can anybody tell me if there was a farm or stables located where the market now stands?”

TROUSERSNAKES
A 22-year-old man was arrested in Kristiansand, Norway, after getting off a ferry from Hirtshals in Denmark with 14 baby king pythons in stockings taped to his abdomen and 10 albino leopard geckos in boxes taped to his thighs. Customs officers became suspicious after finding a tarantula in his luggage. “They quickly realised the man was smuggling animals,” said a spokesman, “because his entire body was in constant motion.” Dublin Metro, Sun, 27 Oct 2009.

WAFER ‘MIRACLE’
The Catholic Church in Poland was investigating claims of a miracle after a communion wafer that fell into water during a mass in the eastern village of Sokolka was reported – by Prof. Maria Sobaniec-Lotowaska, of the medical univers­ity of Bialystok – to have become human heart tissue. A biologist said the ‘miracle’ was merely bacteria growing on the bread. D.Telegraph, 30 Oct 2009.

HOLE-IN-WONDER
A 64-year-old widow defied odds of 67 million to one with two holes-in-one during a single round of golf. Ruth Day, of Tynemouth, North Tyneside, who has a 35 handicap, achieved her first ever hole-in-one on the 136m third hole at Whitley Bay club and her second at the tougher 13th hole, which is 161m. [PA] 19 Sept 2009.

LETHAL HAIL
Freak storms in the rural Austrian province of Salzburg, with hailstones the size of tennis balls, left hundreds of deer dead or so badly injured that they had to be put down. The hail also killed 90 per cent of pheasants and 80 per cent of hares. Sepp Eder, hunting chief for the region, said: “It may take five years for animal numbers to recover, if they ever do so.” D.Telegraph, 20 Oct 2009.

THRILLS FOR BULGARS
Authorities in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, are investigating a new gambling game called “Russian road roul­ette”, in which drivers defy death by speeding through red lights for bets of up to €5,000. The game has been played at night at busy crossroads since the summer. Participants are informed of the venue by text messages. In June, two people died after a motorcyclist crashed into an onlooker at a similar rally on Sofia’s ring road. [R] 29 Oct 2009.

TARGET DEVON
Josh Chapple, six, was collect­ing eggs from his family’s hens on 14 August (the day after a Perseid meteor shower) when he found an egg-sized, shiny black rock near the back door of his house in Bratton Fleming, Devon, that turned out to be a meteorite. “There were burn marks all over it,” he said. D.Express, Metro, 21 Aug 2009.

SARDONIC
Homer coined the phrase “sardonic grin” after ceremon­ial killings in Sardinia, where Phœnician colonists gave an intoxicating potion to criminals and the elderly that put a smile on their face. They were then dropped from a high rock or beaten to death. Italian scientists think they have found the herb responsible: hemlock water dropwort (Oenanthe crocata), common on Sardinia and popularly known as “water celery”, which makes facial muscles contract into a grimace or rictus. Scientific American, Aug 2009.

HEAD RETURNED
The head of an African king was returned to Ghana on 24 July. Badu Bonsu II, hereditary chief of the Ahanta tribe on the Gold Coast, had killed two Dutch emissaries in 1837 and displayed their severed heads on his throne. The Dutch sent a punitive expedition, hanged the monarch and sent his head to Holland, where it languished at the Leiden University Med­ical Centre until discovered in a cupboard in 2002 by novelist Arthur Japin. Independent, 25 July 2009.

ALMOST A HABIT
The town of Codell in Kansas was hit by a devastating tornado on 20 May 1918. It had also been hit by tornadoes at about the same time in the evening, on exactly the same day, both in 1916 and in 1917. Metro, 29 May 2009.

FALL GUY
When traffic wardens in Birmingham, Alabama, issued traffic tickets to cars without plates, they entered seven Xs on the forms. Unfortunately for Scottie Robinson, 38, of the nearby town of Huntsville, this default code matched his vanity plate XXXXXXX – a combination of his nickname “Racer X” and his favourite number, seven. Before a new ticketing system was introduced, he was receiving up to 10 fines a day for parking offences all over Birmingham. D.Telegraph, 21 Oct 2009.

A HILL OF BEANS
When British soldiers found a 1.3-tonne bag of seeds during a major operation in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in late June, the find was trumpeted as a big haul of opium poppy seeds. However, tests showed that they were in fact mung beans – perfectly legal but much less profitable. [R] 2 July 2009.

LETHAL SEAWEED
A horse was killed and its rider rendered unconscious by fumes from rotting seaweed on St-Michel-en-Greve beach in Brittany; and a council worker was hospitalised in a coma after walking on mats of the weed, which can be more than 3ft thick. Hydrogen sulphide builds up under a thin, dry crust on top of the mats, which is broken when walked on. Sunday Times, 9 Aug 2009.

SAVED BY THE BELL
Barry Whitelaw was awakened about 6.45am on 3 August by a phone call to his house in Dinsdale, New Zealand. It was a wrong number, but Mr Whitelaw smelled smoke and found an electric heater on fire. He threw it on the lawn and doused it with water. Ringing back the mystery caller to thank him, he found it was an ex-firefighter from Tauranga called Wayne Kennedy, who had been trying to ring a radio station. Waikato Times (NZ), 4 Aug 2009.

YETI MEMORIAL
In the past decade, nearly 20 Yeti sightings have been reported around the Kuznetsk Basin in southwestern Siberia, so officials in Kemerovo, the region’s capital, decided to erect a statue of the crypto-critter clutching a snowboard. “We wanted it to be fun,” said statue designer Andrei Lyubchenko, “so we added the snowboard.” Metro, 14 April 2009.

PYTHON SURPRISE
A dead 10ft snake, believed to be an aggressive African rock python, was recovered from the River Slaney at Ardamine Bridge near Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland, during a routine river survey on 15 September. It was about 10 years old and half its potential length. Its origin was a mystery. Irish Times, Dublin Metro, 16 Sept 2009.