The squirming underpants
A MAN HAS been arrested in New Delhi after customs officials stopped him trying to board a flight with a tiny (17cm tall) Loris monkey in his underwear. He had just arrived from Bangkok and was attempting to get on an aircraft to Dubai.
The Loris monkey is indigenous to India and south-east Asia and this one was found during a routine security check. The man with the squirming underpants, and two other passengers, were handed over to the Wildlife and Customs Department for questioning and were later arrested.
Indian customs officers are becoming accustomed to cases like this. A man was recently stopped at Mumbai's main airport with 10 turtles in his underwear. Six Persian cats, three poisonous tarantulas and 11 birds' eggs were also seized from he and two accomplices after they landed - also on a flight from Bangkok – though we are not told where the rest of the contraband was stowed.
One senses a looming clash between the need for a crackdown on animal smuggling and rights to privacy. There's a strong school of thought that says what a man has in his underpants is his own business – and perhaps that of two or three close friends. Customs officers have no right to pry.
Just as long as there's no profiling. That really would be a rights violation.
Worst and best
LORD Coe, chairman of the British Olympic Committee (and once, as plain Sebastian Coe, a middle-distance Olympic gold medallist) had an arresting story to tell as he closed the 2012 Paralympics that followed the Olympics.
He was travelling on the London Underground when he got chatting to a young doctor in the purple uniform of a Games Maker volunteer, who was on his way to help out with the boxing.
It transpired that he had been on duty on "7/7" – the awful day of terrorist bombings on the Underground in 2005.
"For me this is closure. I wasn't sure I should come or whether I could face it. I'm so glad I did. For I've seen the worst of mankind and now I've seen the best of mankind."
That just about says it all.
Vroom, vroom!
OVERHEARD in the Street Shelter for the Over-40s: "My sex life is like a Ferrari … I don't have a Ferrari."
No joke
NOT SINCE US President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a rabid bunny has there been a tale as alarming as this. An 83-year-old American woman was attacked repeatedly by a rabid beaver while swimming in a lake in Washington state.
Carter was fishing from a boat down in Florida when he had to fight off the rabid bunny with a paddle. It didn't manage to bite him and unfortunately the world media interpreted the incident as comedy, which did nothing for his re-election campaign (he of course lost).
But this rabid beaver did bite Lillian Peterson – again and again. She and a friend repeatedly hit it with canoe paddles and a walking stick but it would not let go. Wildlife officers arrived and killed it. The beaver tested positive for rabies.
Mrs Peterson is recovering in hospital after anti-rabies injections. One consolation: she doesn't have a re-election campaign to fight.
Weird coincidence
WHY DOES one feel so uneasy about this report that three Nazi bunkers have been uncovered on a beach in Denmark after violent storms off the coast?
The bunkers were found in practically the same condition as on the day the last Nazi soldiers left them after the surrender in May 1945, down to the tobacco found in one soldier's abandoned pipe and a half-finished bottle of Schnapps.
Once part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall from Norway to the south of France, the bunkers were soon covered by sand and became part of the dune system until they recently were exposed again.
The uneasiness? I don't know, it's just a little uncanny the way these Nazi bunkers re-appear in Scandinavia at the time people like Norwegian Anders Breivik are in the spotlight.
Tailpiece
A SURVEY reveals that women feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than when they undress in front of women. The women are too judgmental – the men are just grateful.
Last word
The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost. - Bennett Cerf
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