The Wolong Panda Training Base in Sichuan, China, released a series of photos to China Daily in October to mark the graduation from captivity, and into the wild, of the 2-year-old Tao Tao. Sure enough, Tao Tao and his mother, Cao Cao, were shown frolicking in the woods, accompanied by trainers each dressed in full-length panda suits, including panda heads, as they appeared to demonstrate climbing trees and searching for food.
At the recently opened Soineya "cuddle cafe" in Tokyo, men buy hugging privileges (but no "sex" allowed!) with young women for from 20 minutes to 10 hours at prices (gratuity optional) ranging from the equivalents of $40 to $645, with surcharges for special services (e.g., foot massages, resting heads in each other's laps). (2) The Deluxe Comfort Girlfriend Body Pillow, which began as a boutique-only niche product, recently became available at Amazon.com and Sears.com at around $25. The bolster-like, cuddling-enabled pillow is augmented with two strategically placed mounds and a snuggle-up arm hanging to the side. (There's also an Original Soft and Comfy Boyfriend Pillow, without the mounds.)
"You have wrinkles," the inquiring customer was told, "and your left cheek is larger than your right," explained "Tata," the Bangkok-born woman who recently opened a salon in San Francisco to employ the supposedly traditional Thai art of face-slapping. Frown lines and droopy skin are curable with a 10-minute regimen of well- placed whacks across the cheek (and payment of the $350 fee), Tata told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in October. Masochists are warned that Tata deals in therapy, not punishment. "If you want someone to hit you, go on Craigslist."
A research team at Lund University in Sweden, led by neuroethologist Jochen Smolka, concluded that one reason dung beetles dance in circles on top of dung is to cool off, according to an October report on LiveScience.com. To arrive at their conclusion, the team went to the trouble of painting tiny silicone "boots" on some beetles to protect them from the ambient heat experienced by a control group of beetles, and found that the booted beetles climbed atop the dung less frequently. Explained Smolka, "Like an air-conditioning unit, the moist (dung) is cooled by evaporation."
While the U.S. recently nearly elected a multimillionaire as president, Uruguay's chief executive, Jose Mujica, declared his personal wealth in 2010 as the equivalent of about $1,800 and gives away 90 percent of his $12,000 monthly presidential salary in order to remain true to his political roots with the leftist guerrilla group Tupamaros. He has rejected the government-provided mansion and instead lives with his wife at her family's farmhouse, where he helps work the land, according to a November BBC News profile from Montevideo. "I have to do this," he told a reporter, "because there are many Uruguayans who live with much less."
Financial advisers charge the big bucks because of their sophisticated understanding of money and markets - or maybe because they know how the stars align. A September Marketplace radio program highlighted the newsletters of "financial astrologers" Karen Starich and former Merrill Lynch stock trader Arch Crawford (who left the trading floor because, apparently, astrology is more lucrative). About 300 traders pay $237 a year to learn what Starich knows about Neptune and Saturn, and Crawford's 2,000 subscribers (at least a few of which prefer receiving copies in unmarked wrappers) learned that any new business venture goes south when Mercury is in retrograde.
The Continuing Decline of American Manufacturing: A Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the Associated Press in October that factories in Mexico have recently been supplying American markets with especially potent and inexpensive methamphetamine. "These are sophisticated, high-tech (businesses) ... that are operating with extreme precision," said agent Jim Shroba. The 90 percent-pure product offers "a faster, more intense and longer-lasting high." Many Americans, meanwhile, continue to make small batches of inferior meth in 2-liter soda bottles.
In 2011 only 75 worldwide shark attacks on humans were reported, with only 12 fatal, yet researchers writing recently in the journal Conservation Biology found that about 60 percent of all media reporting about sharks emphasized just the serious dangers that human swimmers face. By contrast, only about 7 percent of the reports were focused on shark biology or ecology, though the sorry state of shark survival would seem more important, in that an estimated 26 million to 73 million sharks are killed annually.
Indonesian coffeemakers made "Kopi Luwak," using only beans that had passed through the digestive tracts of native civet cats. More recently, Thailand's upscale Anantara Resorts began offering coffee using beans similarly excreted by elephants. In both cases, these digestive-tract coffee beans, picked and processed by laborers earning as little as $1 day.
People Different From
