Community ClicksOnly part-time royalty
“When I get to Africa, I have to worship him,” said Elizabeth Osei, part-time first lady of the Akwamu people of eastern Ghana, speaking of her husband Isaac, who is the Akwamu chief.
“When I get back, he has to worship me” (because Elizabeth is the president of the couple’s New York City taxi company, where they work 12-hour days when they’re not Ghanian royalty).
Isaac’s reign, according to an August New York Times report, covers several months a year and requires divine-like wisdom in adjudicating his people’s disputes.
Another New Yorker with a prestigious double life is Mohamed Mohamed, a state transportation bureaucrat, who recently returned to his cubicle in Buffalo, N.Y., after nine months as prime minister of Somalia.
The Buffalo News reported that the Somali native, though shocked by the level of the country’s dysfunction, at least got to stand up to “terrorists, pirates and warlords” and “address dignitaries from the United Nations.”
Diversity
The convenient Russian myth that “beer” (up to 10 percent alcohol by volume) is a “soft drink” will end shortly, following the enactment of restrictions signed by President Dmitry Medvedev in July.
Beer had been rapidly replacing vodka as the country’s primary alcoholic beverage, as people drank it with impunity around the clock in public places (since they pretended they were consuming nothing more powerful than a “cola”).
<<< Until recently, impoverished Indonesians sought to cure various illnesses (such as diabetes and high blood pressure) by lying on railroad tracks as trains approached, thus allowing electrical charges from the tracks to course therapeutically through their bodies.
A combination of anecdotal successes and dissatisfaction with the state-operated health care system led to the instances in which hundreds at a time lay on the tracks, according to an August Associated Press dispatch.
America in decline
A U.S. military investigation disclosed (according to a July Washington Post report) that at least four of the eight Afghan trucking firms involved in a $2.16 billion Pentagon contract designed to ferry supplies to American troops are likely to have employed subcontractors with direct ties to the Afghan Taliban.
<<< United Nations investigators revealed (according to an August New York Times report) that about half of the U.S.-supplied weapons for Ugandan and Burundian troops to battle the Somalian terror group al-Shabab have ultimately wound up in al-Shabab’s hands.
The poorly paid Ugandan and Burundian troops apparently found arms sales more profitable than fighting terrorists.
A recurring theme emerges
From time to time, Tibetan Buddhists inadvertently support the seafood industry with campaigns of “liberation” of living beings.
In August, a Buddhist group purchased 534 lobsters from a Gloucester, Mass., wholesaler, sprayed them with holy water, clipped off their claw bindings, and released them into the Atlantic Ocean.
Of course, the lobsters were almost certainly re-caught, by Gloucester lobstermen.
A 2004 News of the Weird story from Marina del Rey, Calif., reported that a Buddhist group made monthly pilgrimages to the harbor, purchased bait and “liberated” it, though it almost certainly was immediately eaten by fish.
Classic weird news from 2003
A two-week spree of five customer holdups in front of ATMs in Cambridge, Mass., came to an end in November (2003) with the arrest of Richard McCabe, 38.
In four of the five robberies, bank security cameras photographed the perpetrator, and McCabe was apparently so disliked by so many that when police released the photos, more than 100 people called, eager to rat him out.
“Many … people knew him personally from dealing with him in the past,” a detective said.
