From the dangers of letting women sit up front, to Hong Kong’s fishy lobster meatballs, here is a weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world:
BEWARE! WOMEN
A Ugandan traders association has banned women from riding up front in trucks saying short skirts and bare thighs could be distracting drivers and causing accidents.
Photo: AFP
Even wives are banned. Patrick Opio Obote of the Lira vendors group said that some hussies even “take the drivers to bars and drink alcohol and they end up causing accidents.”
Covering up is complicated by the fact that conservative Ugandans do not like women wearing trousers. While women’s rights groups denounced the lorry ban as more “male chauvinism,” some wondered if it would be safer if women took the wheel.
LOCKED IN LOVE
Relations between the sexes are running much smoother in China now after a woman stuck on a never-ending first date by a lockdown went viral last week by complaining that her suitor was “as mute as a wooden dummy” and a “mediocre” cook.
This week Zhao Xiaoqing, a 28-year-old woman from northern China’s Shaanxi province, got engaged to her beau after they too were trapped on a date. This time however love rather than boredom blossomed, although some Chinese social media users were skeptical.
“After a year or two you’ll get tired of each other and divorce... I’ve seen too many of these kinds of flash marriages,” one netizen wrote.
BUT IS IT ART?
A Russian artist has been arrested for creating a snow statue of a giant turd near a war memorial in central Saint Petersburg.
Ivan Volkov, 30, painted his five-meter-long creation brown and drew a yellow puddle around it before posting pictures of it on Instagram with the legend, Caca.
SHELL-SHOCKED
It may look like lobster and taste like lobster, but if you are eating it in Hong Kong, it probably isn’t, the city’s Consumer Council warned.
Gourmets in the food-obsessed city are more than a little crabby at the results of DNA tests on one of its favorite foods, lobster meatballs.
Crustacean DNA was not found in any of the 10 samples the council tested, including one which listed lobster as an ingredient.
The mystery now is what are they made of. “We found some other ingredients... that might be other seafood or even meat-type” things, the council’s chairwoman said.
LETTUCE PRAY
America’s most famous rabbit is no more. Former US vice president Mike Pence’s bunny Marlon Bundo became an unlikely gay hero after a parody book about him falling in love with another buck rabbit topped bestseller lists, satirizing his owner’s anti-LGBTQ stance.
Pence’s daughter, Charlotte, who authored the series of children’s books told from Bundo’s point of view, broke the bad news about Bundo’s death to Americans.
When the first Bundo book was released, British TV comedian John Oliver published a parody version to support gay charities. Its sales outpaced the original and at one point held the number one spot on Amazon.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located