FT261

WORM ASTRONAUTS
On 3 February, Iran successfully launched a rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and a consignment of worms into space – a feat President Ahmadinejad said showed that Iran could defeat the West in the battle of technology. “Worms in space serve no purpose,” huffed a US expert. Independent, 4 Feb 2010.

DOING IT ON PORPOISE
Marine biologists blame dolphins for the growing number of dead harbour porpoises found on Californian beaches in recent years. Conservation group Okeanis shot a video of male bottlenose dolphins corralling a porpoise, ramming and drowning it, then bringing the carcass to researchers on a boat before swimming away. (Brisbane) Sunday Mail, 6 Nov 2009.

LOVELORN
Vaibhav Bedi, 26, sued the deodor­ant manufacturer Unilever for £50,000 for “depression and psychological damage”. He said he had been using their products for seven years, but never benefited from the advertised Lynx effect. “Their advertisements said women will be attracted to you,” he said, “but no girl came to me.” He took the action in New Delhi, where Lynx is sold under the name Axe. Sun, 31 Oct 2009.

EXPLODING FAG
Andi Susanto, a 31-year-old Indonesian security guard, was riding his motorbike when the Clas Mild cigarette he was smoking exploded, taking out six of his teeth. He had been smoking since he was a schoolboy and had never had any problems. “It was all so unexpected,” he said. The manufacturers, PT Nojorono Tobacco, awarded him £335 and his medical costs in compensation, but couldn’t explain the accident. BBC News, D.Telegraph, 2 Feb 2010.

THEFTS FROM THEFT SHOW
Organisers of an exhibition called “Antiquities Theft in Israel” could not have chosen a more fitting name. On 20 January, burglars broke into the Korin Maman Museum in the coastal city of Ashdod where artefacts recovered from the black market were on show, and snatched a silver ring belonging to Alexander the Great and other items including gold earrings, pottery and coins from the Hellenistic period. The popular exhibition had been running for four years. [R] D.Telegraph, 21 Jan 2010.

BUDGIE DEATH MYSTERY
Thirty-eight birds died during the Gwynnedd Budgerigar Soc­iety Open Show in North Wales. Hundreds of the birds were lined up in their cages for judging when one toppled off its perch. Soon other birds began “dropping like dominoes”. About 300 were affected, most of which revived in the open air. A vet found that two of the birds died from congestion and hæmorrhaging of the lungs. A gas leak was ruled out. Sun, 16 Nov; Times, 17 Nov 2009.

SUNNY DISPOSITION
Here’s a jolly fatwa from Sheikh ibn Baaz, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1999: “The person who maintains that the Sun does not move should be condemned to death after being called upon to repent, as his denials of the motion of the Sun constitute a denial of God’s Word.” Independent, 26 Nov 2009.

FIRE PLAGUE
Mohamad Sidek Hamid, 49, his wife and six children have been forced to live in a small hut for the past two years because of a run of inexplic­able fires at their brick house in Kampung Charok Meranti, Malaysia. The fires, which usually happened when no one was home, started soon after the family moved there in 2007. Money had also gone missing. A hundred bomoh (shamans) had failed to diagnose the problem. The Star (Malaysia), 4 Nov 2009.

COWS LICK HOUSE
Jerry Lynn Davis of Rogersville, Tennessee, called the local sheriff’s office on 3 December to complain that a neighbour’s cows had been licking his house and had caused about 100 dollars in damage by ripping off a screen window, cracking the glass and pulling down a gutter. The house was a couple of feet from a fence enclosing the cows’ pasture. It was not known what made it so tasty. [AP] 7 Dec 2009.

METAL MUNCHERS
Margaret Daalmans, 52, an estate agents’ secretary from Rotterdam, Netherlands, complained of stomach pains. An X-ray revealed 78 forks and teaspoons. These were removed and she made a full recovery. Doctors in Cajamarca city, Peru, removed 680g of metal from the stomach of construction worker Requelme Abanto, 26, including nails, coins, rusted copper wire and scrap metal. He ate the metal for months; “I swallowed 17 nails in February and didn’t die,” he said. “Five-inch nails, all in one day.” He told a TV channel that he might now do it in public “as sport.” Metro, Sun, 29 Oct; [AP] 12 Nov 2009.

DUMB BERLINER
A 76-year-old man blew up his car in Berlin after trying to thaw it out by putting a blow heater under the bonnet. Police said he left the heater on next to the frozen windscreen washer and returned indoors. Shortly afterwards he heard two explosions. Sunday Mercury, 31 Jan 2010.

HEAD BANGERS
Lin Kwun, 53, was knocked out by a string of sausages dropped by magpies in Nanjing, eastern China. Sun, 6 Jan 2010.

STATE SECURITY
Since he was sworn in in Sept­ember 2008, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has had a black goat slaughtered at his house almost every day to ward off the Evil Eye and protect him from black magic. The goats are killed as an act of Sadaqah (meaning “voluntary charity” in Islam), whereby one gives out money or meat to the poor to win Allah’s blessing and stave off misfortune. Independent, 28 Jan 2010.

LATEST RELIC
The grey fedora hat worn by nightclub manager Jack Ruby when he gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald live on tele­vision on 24 November 1963 fetched £32,000 at auction in Dallas. D.Express, 6 Nov; Sun, 9 Nov 2009.

DRINKERS VANISH
Ray Shepherd-Smith, 52, a barman who lives above the Royal Findhorn Yacht Club in Moray, was preparing to open the bar at 7pm when he saw two elderly men waiting. They said they were life members, and ordered a rum and a whisky. He rang up their drinks on the till, but when he went to check where they were, the rest of the place was in darkness. CCTV footage showed no one had left or entered the building, but Mr Shepherd-Smith was filmed serving up the drinks and talking off camera. Times, 2 Dec 2009.

FLYING DOG
Jamie Padden had stopped at an intersection in Davenport, Iowa, on 5 December 2009 when a small Pomeranian dog fell from the sky followed by a great horned owl ready to retrieve its lost snack. Ms Padden chased off the owl, then rescued the dog, took it home and called police. It turned out the dog, called Sadie, had been carried about two miles, or 24 to 30 city blocks. It was severely traumatised, but escaped with bruising and a broken tail. Quad-City Times (Iowa), 14 Dec 2009.

WORLD’S BIGGEST
The largest rock in the world is thought to be Burring­urrah (Mount Augustus) in Western Australia, which is 2.5 times bigger than Uluru (Ayers Rock). What’s more, Burring­urrah is a monolith, while Uluru isn’t. Sydney Sun-Herald, 13 Dec 2009.

KLINGON EXPERIMENT
D’Armond Spears, who spoke only Klingon to his son Alec for three years, abandoned the project after realising Alec didn’t enjoy it. Dr Spears, a doctor of computational linguistics in Minnesota, said he wanted to examine how children acquired language by addressing Alec only in the guttural tones of the alien species featured in Star Trek. Alec, now 13, doesn’t speak a word of Klingon. Sun, Independent, 21 Nov 2009.