Remove ImagesNews of the Weird
February 05, 2009
HERE SHE COMES, MISS RIYADH
Saudi Arabia is host to several camel beauty pageants each year (condemned as religiously fatuous by Muslim clerics), but the country's first goat beauty pageant was held in September in Riyadh, with the distinctive Najdi breed, featuring high nose bridges and silky, shaggy hair, taking top prizes. In fact, most of the goats in the competition had the same father, Burgan, whose progeny typically fetch the equivalent of $25,000 and up. Still, prize-winning show camels can bring 10 times that amount for the greater status they convey to their owners. Burgan himself did not appear at the pageant, according to a Reuters dispatch, because his owner feared that a jealous competitor would have an "evil eye" cast upon him.
WHY BUY WHEN YOU CAN RENT?
Among the services available by the clock in Japan (according to a January BBC dispatch) are (1) quality time with a pet (about $10 an hour at the Ja La La Cafe in Toyko, usually with dogs or cats but with rabbits, ferrets and beetles available); (2) no-sex quality time with a college coed (flattering conversation by the hour at the Campus Cafe, less expensive than the geisha-type houses); (3) and actors from the I Want To Cheer Up agency in Tokyo, to portray "relatives" for weddings and funerals when actual family members cannot attend, or to portray fathers to help single women with their parenting duties, or to portray husbands to help women practice for the routine of married life (except for sex).
PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
(1) A father took his 20-year-old son to an Islamic court in Bauchi, Nigeria, in October, demanding that he be jailed for idleness, which he said has shamed the family. (The court immediately sentenced the son to 30 lashes and six months in prison.) (2) In December, a court in Seoul, South Korea, fined the parents of a teenage rapist the equivalent of about $60,000 for their negligence in raising the boy badly. (The 18-year-old himself is serving a 10-year sentence for the crime.)
POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS
(1) In November, the student association at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, voted to eliminate a cystic fibrosis organization from the list of charities it supports, explaining that since the condition almost exclusively afflicts white people, it was not "inclusive" enough to merit student funding. (2) In December, Britain's Oxford University Press announced the latest changes in its highly selective Junior Dictionary, finding room to add dozens of words, including trapezium, alliteration and incisor but eliminating, for example, bishop, chapel, christen, minister, monk, nun, parish, psalm and saint. The publisher said the changes reflect Britain's "multicultural, multifaith" society.
BREAST INTENTIONS
Photographer Yeon Lee's exhibit in a London gallery in December featured a burqa-clad model, fully robed from head to toe except for a tiny opening, but that opening was not the typical one, for the woman's eyes. Ms. Lee's openings exposed only the model's nipples, highlighting, she said, "the ways women are categorized in male-dominated societies."
GRANHANDLING
Evelyn Poynter, 86, had refused for months to leave her apartment in Pittsburgh and move in with her sister, Laura Stewart, 72, who had offered to take care of her. In December, according to police, a fed-up Stewart forcibly wrapped Poynter's arms, legs, neck and body in duct tape, tossed her in the back seat, and drove her home to Shaker Heights, Ohio. "There was nothing sinister," said Stewart's daughter, but still, Stewart was arrested. MTW