Lead Story
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A harsh winter has reduced Colombia’s exports of the hormiga culona, or big-butt queen ant, prompting a spike in prices for chocolate-dipped ants in London and ant-based sauces and spreads at home, according to an Associated Press dispatch in August. And a July Reuters story calls New York’s Explorers Club virtually the only place where gourmands can enjoy such delicacies as scorpion, cricket, tarantula, and maggot, as well as the eyeballs and testicles of livestock.
In August police arrested five strippers who were performing at a funeral in China’s rural Jiangsu province to boost attendance; many there believe that a well-attended funeral leads to a successful afterlife. Village officials established a “funeral misdeeds” hotline shortly after the arrests. And Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia recently celebrated the “hungry ghost” festival, a period during which the gates of hell supposedly open and ghosts forage for food on earth. To help appease them, Buddhists create paper effigies of items they would like to make use of after they die, such as maids and TV sets.
In August Sarah Yule was fired from her job as an emergency-room receptionist at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Troy, New York, because she refused to remove her lip ring. Yule claimed that the ring, along with the rest of her piercings, was integral to her religion, the Church of Body Modification. And in February Joseph Butts was arrested after a traffic stop in Franklin County, Missouri, where he was caught with 338 pounds of marijuana. According to a report in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Butts told the officer that his arrest was a hate crime because he was a “special courier” for the Church of Cognizance, which considers marijuana a “deity and a sacrament.”
Least Competent People
Continuing a review of frequently recurring stories that have been retired from circulation: No Longer Weird number 40 is the person (usually a woman) who hoards animals (usually cats), followed by the carjacker forced to abandon a car because he never learned to drive stick, the criminal suspect who attempts to swim to evade capture and then drowns, and the pervert who hides a tiny video camera in a public restroom.
