From a bizarre bucket list item to Australian election hijinks, and dusting off the horse to beat the hike in gas prices to an Indian couple who really, really want grandchildren, it was another typically strange and wacky week around the world.
VISITING TAHITI MIGHT HAVE BEEN BETTER
A 19-year-old woman who fled from law enforcement in the Florida Keys told the deputy who caught up to her that getting arrested was on her “bucket list.” She was charged with fleeing and eluding, Monroe County Sheriff’s officials said, after a deputy spotted the woman’s vehicle driving recklessly. Before she was taken to jail the woman said getting arrested had been on her bucket list since high school.
WHERE CAN I PARK MY HORSE?
Stephanie Kirchner’s journey to work has got longer but, she says, cheaper: she has left her Toyota SUV at home and switched to real horsepower. Stud farm owner Kirchner, 33, says she decided “it can’t go on like this” after fuel prices jumped following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, she has switched to travelling the roughly 6 km from her home in western Germany by horse-drawn carriage. That turns a one-way trip from 10-15 minutes to as much as an hour. But Kirchner calculates that, given how much fuel her car consumes, she saves about $264 per month if she can use horsepower every day.
Her carriage, drawn by two horses, is popular with children and some others. But “of course humanity is hectic and then some people are annoyed if they can’t get past me fast enough,” Kircher says. She acknowledges that her answer to rising fuel prices isn’t for everyone. “I can’t put a horse in a parking garage,” she says. “I think a lot more horse riders would do it if opportunities were created for the horses.”
SUPREME SHENANIGANS
A man impersonating North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (photo) disrupted the recent Australian election campaign when he burst into an event that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was attending with lawmaker Gladys Liu. The impersonator, who later identified himself by the stage name Howard X, declared. “Thank you very much. Gladys Liu is the communist candidate for Australia,” before being interrupted by an aide to Morrison, who said, “Excuse me, you are going to have to leave. This is the most offensive thing I have ever seen in a campaign.” The impersonator responded: “Excuse me, you don’t tell the supreme leader what to do. I support Gladys Liu.”
NO PRESSURE
A retired Indian couple is suing their son and daughter-in-law, demanding that they produce a grandchild within a year or pay them 50 million rupees ($675,000). Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad, 61, said it was an emotional and sensitive issue for him and his wife, Sadhana Prasad, and they cannot wait any longer as their son, a pilot, was married six years ago. “The main issue is that at this age we need a grandchild, but these people (my son and daughter-in-law) have an attitude that they don’t think about us. We got him married in the hope we would have the pleasure of becoming grandparents. It has been six years since their marriage. It feels as if despite having everything we have nothing.”
ROLL OF THE DICE DOESN’T PAY OFF
The money was supposed to be COVID-19 assistance for low-income households in a small Japanese town, but it was mistakenly wired to a bank account of a resident who refused to return it and spent most of it on online gambling, police said. Sho Taguchi, a 24-year-old jobless resident in the town of Abu in western Japan, was arrested after police said he admitted to spending most of the 46.3 million yen ($360,000) of taxpayers’ money on gambling, leaving only 68,000 yen ($530) in his bank account after making 34 withdrawals in just over 10 days after the town made the mistake.
LIFE IMITATES ART
A man who as a child had a brief but key role in “Jaws” has been named police chief on the Massachusetts island on which the 1975 movie was partially filmed. Jonathan Searle was offered the job of police chief in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.
The movie centres on the efforts of a police chief in a fictional resort town trying to rid the local waters of a killer shark. Scenes were filmed in various locations on Martha’s Vineyard. In the movie, Searle played one of two boys who send beachgoers into a panic by swimming around with a fake shark’s fin.