FT259

BIRTH DRAMA
Rinku Debu Rai (or Ray), 30 (or 28), gave birth in a train lavatory in eastern India. The newborn boy fell through the chute onto the tracks. Mrs Rai leapt from the West Bengal Express train and ran back along the tracks. Her husband, Bhola, pulled the emergency stop cord. He and a crowd of passengers discovered the young woman sitting beside the tracks cradling her unharmed child. In 2008, a newborn girl similarly survived a fall from a train lavatory in Gujarat. D.Telegraph, 8 Oct; Independent, 9 Oct 2009.

TITS EATING BATS
Ornithologists were surprised to observe great tits killing and eating pipistrelle bats in a Hungarian cave. They watched them over three winters and found they foraged for bats far less when given extra food, indicating that they only started hunting when there was a food shortage. Dublin Herald, 9 Sept 2009.

NEVER TOO OLD
Ahmed Muhamed Dore (or Dhore), who claims to be 112, has married Safia Abdulleh (or Safiya Abdulle), who is only 17. The ceremony took place in the central Somalian town of Guriceel in the Galguduud region. Mr Dore already has 18 (or 13) children by five wives, but hopes to sire more. His eldest son is 80. The bride’s family said she was “happy with her new husband”. BBC News, D.Telegraph, 29 Oct; D.Mail, Independent, 30 Oct 2009.

SEASONAL CHEER
An inmate of Verne Prison in Portland, Dorset, passed off the cannabis crop in his cell as tomato plants for at least five months while clueless wardens admired his green fingers. He even decorated one 4ft plant as a Christmas tree. Gold-toothed Mohamed Jalloh, 28, from Brent, serving eight years for class A drug dealing, was grassed up by a fellow prisoner. Staff then identified the plants, visible from the exercise yard, using Google snaps. Sun, 5 Dec; Guardian, Independent, 10 Dec 2009.

NARROW ESCAPES
An asteroid 33ft wide exploded with the energy of three Hiroshima bombs in the atmosphere above Indonesia on 8 October last year. Witnesses heard the explosion and saw a huge fireball. Another asteroid 23ft wide, called 2009 VA, came within 8,700 miles of Earth on 6 November. It wasn’t spotted until 15 hours earlier. Had it come any closer it would probably have burned up in the atmosphere. London Lite, 29 Oct; D.Mail, 11 Nov 2009.

NOT HER AGAIN
Hee Orama, 34, a woman in Clarksville, Tennessee, who kept calling 911 to complain that a man refused to marry her, was arrested. The previous  week, her incessant 911 ‘emergencies’ were that she couldn’t find her car. New York Post, 9 Nov 2009.

SEA GHOST
Spectacular green neon flashes flaring up along Ireland’s east coast last October were not caused by radio­active waste, as some feared, but were probably bioluminescent plankton called Noctiluca scintillans, sometimes known as Sea Ghost or Fire of Sea. Swimmers taking dips after dark were enjoying the aquatic light show when the water was disturbed. The phenomenon was last observed off the south-west Irish coast in 2004; it is common elsewhere in the world. Dublin Metro, Dublin Herald, 19 Oct 2009.

PIOUS CODFISH
Here’s a classic fortean item recently unearthed by archivist Allen Foster. The stomach of a cod caught in Dundee, Scotland, was found to contain a Bible bound in calf skin, bearing on the title page the name of William Sim and the date 1830. Irish Times, 7 Mar 1874.

SUICIDE WASHOUT
In a bid to kill himself, Nathan Ryan, 27, rigged up a sword so that he would be impaled, then drove his car into a brick wall. But the car crashed through the wall and sank in his neighbour’s swimming pool in Chandler, Arizona. The airbag bent the sword out of shape; Ryan swam for his life and faced a huge repair bill. Sun, 22 June 2009.

A BIT DRASTIC
Captain Mousa Camara, the anti-crime chief in Guinea, has urged citizens to adopt a strategy for easing overcrowding in the West African nation’s jails. “I’m asking you to burn all armed bandits who are caught red-handed,” he said. [R] 3 June 2009.

FEET IN ATTIC
Two human feet were found in the attic of a house in the Terenure area of south Dublin during renovation work in December 2008. One belonged to a child aged about 10, the other to an adult male with part of the lower leg attached. Carbon dating placed the feet between 60 BC and AD 230, suggesting that they came from bog bodies. The house may once have been the resid­ence of a path­ologist who worked in the Irish midlands, where many bog bodies have turned up during turf-cutting. Irish Times, 14 Sept 2009.

EGG KILLS CHICKEN
A chicken belonging to Chris Schauerman of Honeoye Falls, New York State, laid a 5oz egg (two and a half times normal size), along with five normal eggs. The stressed bird then died. D.Telegraph, 2 Oct 2009.

BIRTH PORTENT
Thousands of people were visiting a remote mountain village in Nepal to worship a baby born in January 2009 with four arms and four legs, revering him as a reincarnation of the elephant god Ganesh. Six-month-old Risab had a headless parasitic twin attached to his abdomen. “Some say it is a miracle or that it is a god, and others say it is a curse,” said the boy’s father, Rikhi Ghimire, 32. Guardian, 11 Aug 2009.

WE’LL DRINK TO THAT
Three friends each sank holes-in-one on the same day during a golf competition – and each had to buy drinks for the entire club in Heworth, Tyne and Wear. Sun, 22 Oct 2009.

QUITE A TOOLKIT
A mutant goat in India was granted a stay of execution after its owner decided that the animal’s six legs, four testicles and three penises were a gift from God. However, it was due to be offered up at Id-ul-Juha, the feast of sacrifice, in Varanasi in December. Independent, 21 Nov 2009.

DELIVERANCE
A book of psalms held to his chest by pastor Mauricio Condori, 38, saved him when a raider’s bullet hit it in Argentina. News of the World, 31 May 2009.

DEATH WORM’S COUSIN?
Using an “electro shocker” to draw them to the surface, scientists have begun hunting for a giant, sweet-smelling worm that spits at predat­ors and lives in 15ft-deep burrows. The Palouse earthworm has been spotted only a handful of times in the past 30 years. It grows up to 3ft long and was thought to be extinct until a 6in specimen was dug up in 2005. The Palouse prairie is two million acres of steep, silty dunes near the Idaho-Washington border. D.Telegraph, 28 July 2009.

TRAVELLING LIZARDS
David Neil, manager of the National Trust’s café in Edinburgh, discovered a live 8in Lebanon lizard in a bag of rocket salad imported from Israel. “He has obviously been in transit for a number of days and would probably have been refrigerated throughout much of the journey,” said the Trust’s nature conservation officer. “We suspect he went into a state of hibernation.”
Another lizard, dead this time, was found last May by Giuseppe Ferri when he bit into a cheese and tomato sandwich at a hospital canteen in Maceretta, Italy. BBC News, 27 Oct; Irish Times, 15 May 2009.