4th October 2003, lunch time | Comments (0)
A few thoughts for the day:
Isn't the World an odd place? News from the Daily Telegraph:
Men face £3.70 fine for night on town
In Regina’s bar in the main square of Torredonjimeno on Thursday night, Rafael Sanchez, a farm worker, clutched his glass of beer with white knuckles.
I am not going home. They can’t make me. This town has gone totally silly,he said defiantly.It was the first night of a new regime in which the town’s mayor, Javier Checa, has banned men from going out on Thursday evenings. All men found out of their houses between 9pm and 2am on a Thursday will be fined five euros.
Mr Checa said the new policy was designed to free women of domestic shackles and to raise people’s awareness of sexual equality, but the scheme has bitterly divided the town. He expects the town’s menfolk to stay at home to look after the children and do the washing up.
In the bars, people muttered darkly about Mr Checa making Torredonjimeno the laughing stock of Spain.
I would send men who break the ban to jail if I could, but there is no jail in the town,said Mr Checa.Steadfastly ignoring the ban, Mr Sanchez said that people did not mind that Mr Checa had declared himself to be a homosexual,
But this is going too far,he said,and next he wants to ban television one day a month.
Your money or your cat
The power company that supplies Russia’s far eastern port of Vladivostok is threatening to kidnap the pets of customers who fail to pay their bills.
It says it will hold them in a pound until the customers pay. If they do not, it will sell them.
We will take their nearest and dearest. Then let a father explain to his daughter why her beloved pussy cat has gone.Non-payment of utilities is a chronic problem in Russia, where millions of people struggle to meet ends meet. Ageing infrastructure means that it is often impossible to disconnect individual customers.
The company says it is owed more than £6 million.
Mafia’s revenge on cat
Russia’s only “sniffer cat”, hailed for its successes in the campaign against the bloody and lucrative world of caviar smuggling, has been run over and killed in a suspected contract killing.
After wandering in to a customs checkpoint as a stray kitten last year, Rusik soon became the scourge of the Stavropol region’s mafia by hunting out caviar being smuggled from the Caspian Sea to Moscow, and on towards the lucrative Western market.
Rusik’s prowess was made public last week. It proved to be a fatal error. Now Rusik is dead, mown down by a car in which he had once discovered smuggled sturgeon.
Rusik’s demise was just the latest blow to Stavropol’s crime-fighters. Another cat, Barsik, succumbed a few weeks ago after eating a poisoned mouse.
Jump up to the start of the post ↑
A collection of miscellaneous links that don't merit a main blog posting, but which are interesting none-the-less.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.— George W Bush (9)
Stuff from the intersection of design, culture and technology.(3)
A selection of blogs I read on a regular basis.