Dietary tips for a long life from Australia, an unbelievable plane crash, money business in South Florida, and a flower that smells like, well, you’ll have read on to find out what… Plus the rest of this week’s unusual and interesting news:
SMART THINKING
Australia’s oldest-ever man has included eating chicken brains among his secrets to living more than 111 years. Retired cattle rancher Dexter Kruger marked 124 days since he turned 111, a day older than World War I veteran Jack Lockett was when he died in 2002. Kruger told Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview at his nursing home in the rural Queensland state town of Roma days before the milestone that a weekly poultry delicacy had contributed to his longevity. “Chicken brains. You know, chickens have a head. And in there, there’s a brain. And they are delicious little things,” Kruger said. “There’s only one little bite.” The oldest-ever verified Australian was Christina Cook, who died in 2002 aged 114 years and 148 days.
CAT SCRATCH FEVER
Dubai police Tuesday warned inhabitants of a residential neighbourhood in the skyscraper-studded city that a “wild cat” was loose in the area. Police didn’t name the animal but the thrill of keeping lions, cheetahs, and tigers as pets is popular in some quarters of the Gulf Arab states, where it’s seen as a status of wealth and power. Though it is illegal to keep as pets endangered or threatened wildlife in the UAE, there have been numerous sightings of Emirati men in luxury cars accompanied by pet lions along for the cruise. A lion escaped from a house in Dubai’s Al Barsha neighborhood in 2016 before police seized it. In Kuwait, a man was sued in 2014 after his pet lion escaped and attacked a Filipina maid.
THE SAN FRANCISCO TREAT
Residents of a San Francisco Bay Area city flocked to an abandoned gas station to get a whiff of a corpse flower — so-called because of the stench it emits when it blooms — after its owner decided to share the rare plant with his neighbours. Solomon Leyva, a nursery owner in Alameda who deals in exceptionally rare plants, had been posting on social media about his amorphophallus titanum. When he saw a lot of interest in the giant blooming flower, he decided to wheel it to the abandoned building, where a line of people stretched down the block for most of the day. By 4 p.m., at least 1,200 residents had visited the flower.
“Everyone is commenting to me that the last time they’ve seen this was in San Francisco, and there was a barrier, and they had to wait for hours, and they weren’t allowed to get near it,” Leyva said. “I think everyone’s tripping out that they can walk up and wiggle it and smell it.”
MONKEY BUSINESS
A colony of monkeys has lived for about 70 years in urban South Florida, near jets taking off from a nearby airport and fuel storage tanks. No one was quite sure where they came from. Until now. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University say they have traced the colony’s origins to the Dania Chimpanzee Farm. The South Florida SunSentinel reported there was a monkey escape from the farm in 1948, with most of the monkeys recaptured. But not all of them. The rest disappeared into a mangrove swamp, where their descendants live today. The FAU team said the colony currently numbers about 41. Area residents today love their simian neighbours and have established the Dania Beach Vervet Project to protect them and are trying to raise money to buy land to serve as a sanctuary.
SNOW JOB
Prosecutors have dropped their bid for $168,000 in damages from two snowboarders who triggered a slide that buried a service road and destroyed an expensive avalanche mitigation system in Colorado’s backcountry. Outdoor enthusiasts and avalanche prevention specialists were closely watching the case, which stoked concerns that other skiers and snowboarders would be deterred from coming forward to report slides out of fear of costly retribution. The two snowboarders will instead plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment complete 20 to 60 hours of community service as part of the plea deal.
IT WAS JUST A FLESH WOUND
The pilot of an airplane that collided with another midair near Denver requested an emergency landing for engine failure, not knowing that his plane was nearly ripped in half. Miraculously, both planes landed and no one was hurt. The pilot who requested the emergency landing was the only person aboard a twin-engine Fairchild Metroliner that landed at Centennial Airport despite major damage to its tail section. The other pilot parachuted to safety.
Experts say the positive outcome of the collision was a combination of luck and advanced life-saving technology. “It’s very rare for me to be able to say ‘midair’ and ‘no fatalities’ in the same sentence,” said airline expert Joseph LoRusso, while Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Deputy John Bartmann added: “Every one of these pilots needs to go buy a lottery ticket right now.”