Among the ice cream flavors offered recently at Ice Cream City in Namco Nanja Town in Tokyo's Toshima-ku (and posted on the website of the English-language Mainichi Daily News) are these: spinach, garlic, tomato, seaweed, oyster, red wine, goat, chicken, lettuce and potato, wheat, shark fin and something called "raw horse flesh."
EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED
Two reporters from South Africa's largest online news operation, News24, profiled Miyi Shongi, 58, in August, in her quest to avoid a "curse" of stones landing on her. She was forced to leave her home village of Lombani after her home was pounded inexplicably with stones (evidently witnessed by a police officer) and forced again to leave relatives' home in nearby Nhombelani after another rock storm hit her. A spiritualist she consulted concluded that the problem was a spell cast by a Zimbabwean trader to whom she owned money.
WE PREFER 'HONEYBUNCH'
The University of Colorado received much negative publicity in the last year about allegations that its football coach and some players had sexually assaulted or harassed female students, and it fell upon the school's president, Elizabeth Hoffman, to try to minimize the damage. Apparently she took that task seriously at a deposition in a federal sexual-harassment lawsuit. According to a leaked copy of the deposition, reported in June by KUSA-TV in Denver, Hoffman denied that what some call "the C-word" is necessarily "filthy and vile." "It is all in the context," she strained to explain. Asked for an example of a "polite" context, Hoffman said, "I've actually heard [the word] used as a term of endearment."
PRAISE THE LORD, PASS THE VINO
Catholic priest Zivko Kustic told a newspaper in Zagreb, Croatia, in July that his church would lobby the Croatian Parliament for an exemption to a tough drunk-driving law being debated, on the ground that priests have to drink wine in as many as three masses a day, sometimes in three different villages, and often cannot meet the safe blood-alcohol level of under 0.05.
LOW-SPEED CHASETwo men were charged with robbing a Dearborn, Mich., Bank One branch in July, done in by a glitch in their getaway plan. They had hopped on mountain bikes to make their exit, but they were apparently unfamiliar with the gears – both men rode away in first gear (or perhaps second), so slowly that one witness followed them easily on foot, and a bank guard got close enough to shoot one of them in the arm. They were quickly arrested.
THIS COFFEE TASTES LIKE â?¦
News of the Weird has reported several times in the last 12 years on Kopi Luwak, the ultraexpensive coffee derived from beans that have been eaten and excreted by civet cats in Indonesia. In July Massimo Marcone, of the University of Guelph in Canada, published in the journal Food Research International his examination of how taste is affected by the beans' journey through the civet. First, the civet instinctively chooses only the ripest beans. Then, digestive biochemicals penetrate the outer layer of the bean as it passes through the gastrointestinal tract. Internal fermentation by digestive enzymes adds a unique flavor ("earthy, musty, smooth and rich with jungle and chocolate undertones"). Also, proteins are leached out during digestion, thus removing a source of coffee's bitterness.
POOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Ice cream truck driver Markus Miller, 29, was arrested in Enid, Okla., in August after he ended an altercation with an 18-year-old customer by allegedly pulling out his handgun and firing two shots at the woman's feet, one shot of which ricocheted and hit her collarbone. And in July, police in Grahamstown, South Africa, were hunting a soccer referee after the man ended a confrontation with a coach after the referee had yellow-carded his player by pulling out a gun and shooting the coach dead.
ELEPHANTS WIN BY A NOSE
In June, the director of Thailand's corrections system wanted a way to shift inmates' interest away from betting on the Euro 2004 soccer tournament to actually playing soccer, and so had the bright idea to schedule a match against outsiders, to build up their self-esteem. The outsiders happened to be trained soccer-playing elephants from Ayuthaya Elephant Palace, however, and self-esteem might have taken a hit since the inmates could manage only a 5-5 tie. (The elephants apparently were allowed to move the ball with their trunks.)
MOOVED BY MOOLAH
As many as 400 Cambodian pilgrims a day are flocking to the northern village of Phum Trapeang Chum to be licked by a mystical cow that was born in a sacred commune, according to a July Agence France-Presse report. Word got out after the wife of the cow's owner said she was cured of a chronic illness, and other success stories followed. Now the owner is charging the equivalent of about 13 cents for four licks. But, warned the owner, "the cow won't lick people who won't put in their money."
NEXT TIME, SKIP THE SYRINGE
In August, the North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners revoked the license of John Hall of Cornelius, N.C., based on a finding that he had injected his semen into the mouths of several patients during office visits. He had tearfully denied the charges, but his semen was found on syringes turned in by his assistants, and patients testified to an "awful"-tasting substance he had squirted into their mouths. One testified to his seriously improper sexual manner in treating her. Hall told the examiners that the reason he had semen in the office was for a sperm-count test concerning his use of the hair-loss drug Propecia, but then could not explain why other people's DNA (perhaps from their saliva) was also found in the syringes.
FLOWER POWER
Landscape contractor Blair Davis, who lives in a Houston suburb and whose own yard's flora includes the Texas Star hibiscus, was the object of a SWAT-type raid by the Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force in July. A neighbor had reported Davis as having drugs, perhaps because the Texas Star hibiscus somewhat vaguely resembles the marijuana plant, and the prestigious Task Force didn't know any better. Davis said that an agent also asked him warily what he planned to do with the watermelons and cantaloupes that were growing in his backyard.
POWER OUTAGES, WE HAVE concluded, are a blessing. They cut you off from the nattering nabobs of hurricanism, to paraphrase that great American statesmen, Spiro Agnew. Beginning Sept. 3, right through Sept. 6, one could – if one was unlucky enough to still have power and cable – have watched wall-to-wall coverage of Frances' crawl across the Atlantic, including live reports from the beach every time a cloud approached. Tom Terry should be flogged.
