Monday, July 23, 2007

Today in Extraordinarily Odd

It’s been a while since the Germans were involved in a top quality offering of insistent nudity and/or fetishism in public but thankfully they’re back to their old “let it all hang out” selves again with two separate sightings in one fell swoop. The first was in Berlin (the epicenter) when a, as Reuters called her, “mysterious woman”, who emerged from a Ferrari, bought cigarettes at a petrol station and then drove away. Apparently she does it all the time so no one cared which is taken as said. The second was in Serbia as two Austrians and a German enjoyed an afternoon of nude bike riding in response to a heat wave. They were fined. It’s hard to know how to approach nudity with Germans and German culture. Germans who leave Germany and go naked are often shunned or at least bitched about but then, there was the case of the American who went to Germany and walked about naked; upsetting the locals. From whom are we all meant to take our cues? Oh, wait, the American was probably morbidly obese. So, it probably wasn’t really a nudity issue at the end of it. [source] [source]

This is from the weekend but it’s still quality fodder – a Mexican man has weighed in at 560kg (that’s actually more than half a metric tone), making him the world’s fattest man but he’s also lost 200kg and so people are hilariously joking that he might have lost the most weight as well. HE said, "I'm glad to be in the Guinness Book as the fattest man. I am also happy to have lost 200 kilos," but really, you’re way out on a strange, alienating limb when even when you lose the most amount of weight ever but you’re still actually the world’s fattest man. It might even give pause to wonder why he bothered trying. Oh, ok…it’s still good that he’s a celebrity, he can have that. [source]

It’s gearing up to be a week of classic odd news so far because next to the German nudists there’s a story out of Wales which is about a sacred bullock that lives in a Hindu temple in Carmarthenshire. The bullock, named Shambo, tested positive for bovine TB and now, after much legal deliberation, is to be put to death. People are horrified and obviously all care will be taken to ensure the swift and painless death of the animal BUT it is rather interesting that you’d need to spend ALL this time officially thinking about it just because the cow is arbitrarily considered a sacred animal. If it had been a TB infected stoat, one would assume it would simply have suffered a swift stomp to the head and then everyone would have moved on. Life is better when you are a divinely ordained beast with the right contacts. Although, in this case, those contacts didn’t come through and science won out over dogma. Who CAN you rely on these days? [source]

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