J.A. Getzlaff
Welcome to Cowshit Lane
English villagers love their street's name, and they're going to keep it after all.
Is life more fun when you live on a street with a funny name? Maybe so. In Golant, a small village in southwest England, some residents dwell on a lovely little block called Cowshit Lane.
“I live there and I have no objection to the name,” Golant Council Chairman Alistair Barr told the London Times recently.
According to a Reuters report, the street’s name became an issue when Golant decided to draw up a map for the town’s visitors. Apparently, some people felt that Cowshit Lane would leave a dark stain on their village’s sunny image. They suggested renaming the road Cowslip Lane, but in the end, Golant’s residents decided to stick with the original.
Resident and former Council Chairman Douglas Cooper told the Times, “I only wish I lived there, because I could put it on my headed notepaper.”
That’s the spirit! Maybe he’d like to move to San Francisco to live on Uranus.
Sumo wrestler flashes Japan on TV
The giant star loses his loincloth and his match, too.
May 13 was a bad day for Japanese sumo wrestler Asanokiri. During an important match, televised and heavily watched throughout Japan, Asanokiri’s loincloth slipped off, exposing, according to a Reuters report, “his manhood.”
Audiences saw it all. In Japan, sumo wrestlers are the gods of sport, the recipients of reverence and respect. The sight of the once-mythical wrestler in the raw was, apparently, quite a shock.
It was a shock for Asanokiri, too. According to the report, his face went beet red when a sumo elder, who was sitting ringside, spotted the wrestler’s exposed penis and called for him to forfeit the match. (Sumo rules dictate that wrestlers’ privates must always be covered.)
Continue Reading CloseChickens attack toddlers in California
Henpecked by angry citizens, the Sonoma City Council calls foul on free-roaming birds.
Ah, Sonoma, Calif. — rural town-cum-tourist spot. Grapes
drip from the vines, mom-and-pop companies proffer organic
goat cheeses and the leafy town plaza, lined by gift shops,
features meandering chickens.
Everything was fine until a couple of bad eggs began acting
up. According to a Reuters report, several of the plaza’s
chickens, mostly roosters, developed a bad attitude and
began to take out their aggression on toddlers.
After what the news service called “a flurry of attacks on
neighborhood children,” a particularly incensed rooster
jumped an 18-month-old boy without provocation, and the
battle between chickens and parents took off.
London’s “Millennium Wheel” bungles Wordsworth
The poet's sonnet makes no sense and no one notices.
“The river glideth at his own sweet asleep.” For a long time, that was
the last thing riders of the London Eye, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel,
read before being whisked into the sky for spectacular views of the city.
The line appeared on a plaque featuring William Wordsworth’s Sept. 3, 1802,
sonnet, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” and it took five months
before anybody noticed that it didn’t make a lick of sense.
Or perhaps many realized the line didn’t make sense, but chalked it up to
their ignorance of poetry. It took 830,000 rides for someone to recognize
that the 12th and 13th lines had been blended and butchered.
Backpackers stealing from homeless Down Under?
Cheap travelers are helping themselves to meals designated for Australia's homeless.
The Matthew Talbot Hostel, a shelter for homeless men in
downtown Sydney, Australia, has a problem. According to a Reuters report,
up to 50 foreign backpackers a day are arriving on the soup kitchen’s
doorstep looking for dirt-cheap meals that are meant for the city’s needy.
The hostel offers A$1 meals (U.S. 59 cents), rooms for the night and
showers. But word of the shelter, which does not require identification,
spread fast among backpackers bent on stretching their vacation dollars as
far as possible. According to the report, it has even appeared in the “Cheap
Eats” sections of several travel guides.
Kentucky distillery goes up in flames
Lawrenceburg finds itself short 17,000 barrels of bourbon.
How fast does 101-proof bourbon burn? Pretty darn fast,
according to an Associated Press report. Last week in
Lawrenceburg, Ky., a distillery warehouse stocked to the
gills with aging barrels of Wild Turkey went up in flames.
The cause of the fire is unknown, but workers nearby told
Reuters that once the fire started, whiskey barrels could be
heard exploding like gunshots. Within minutes, the
seven-story wooden building went up in flames, taking 17,000
barrels of Kentucky’s favorite hooch with it. The oaken
barrels contained young (and very volatile) bourbon that had
been aging for three years, as well as high-priced bourbon that had been aging for 15 years.
Page 2 of 18 in J.A. Getzlaff
