Funny old world

PARIS — From the dangers of letting women sit up front, to Hong Kong’s fishy lobster meatballs, here is a weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world:

Beware! Women

A Ugandan traders association has banned women from riding up front in trucks saying short skirts and bare thighs could be distracting drivers and causing accidents.

Even wives are banned. 

Patrick Opio Obote of the Lira vendors group told AFP that some hussies even “take the drivers to bars and drink alcohol and they end up causing accidents”. 

Covering up is complicated by the fact that conservative Ugandans do not like women wearing trousers. 

While women’s rights groups denounced the lorry ban as more “male chauvinism”, some wondered if it would be safer if women took the wheel.

Locked in love

Relations between the sexes are running much smoother in China now after a woman stuck on a never-ending first date by a lockdown went viral last week by complaining that her suitor was “as mute as a wooden dummy” and a “mediocre” cook.

This week Zhao Xiaoqing, a 28-year-old woman from northern China’s Shaanxi province, got engaged to her beau after they too were trapped on a date. This time however love rather than boredom blossomed, although some Chinese social media users were sceptical.

“After a year or two you’ll get tired of each other and divorce... I’ve seen too many of these kinds of flash marriages,” one netizen wrote.

But is it art?

A Russian artist has been arrested for creating a snow statue of a giant turd near a war memorial in central Saint Petersburg.

Ivan Volkov, 30, painted his five-metre-long creation brown and drew a yellow puddle around it before posting pictures of it on Instagram with the legend, “Caca”.

Shell-shocked

It may look like lobster and taste like lobster, but if you are eating it in Hong Kong, it probably isn’t, the city’s Consumer Council warned.

Gourmets in the food-obsessed city are more than a little crabby at the results of DNA tests on one of its favourite foods, lobster meatballs.

Crustacean DNA was not found in any of the 10 samples the council tested, including one which listed lobster as an ingredient.

The mystery now is what are they made of. 

“We found some other ingredients... that might be other seafood or even meat-type things,” the council’s chairwoman said.

Lettuce pray

America’s most famous rabbit is no more. Former US vice president Mike Pence’s bunny Marlon Bundo became an unlikely gay hero after a parody book about him falling in love with another buck rabbit topped bestseller lists, satirising his owner’s anti-LGBTQ stance.

Pence’s daughter, Charlotte, who authored the series of children’s books told from Bundo’s point of view, broke the bad news about Bundo’s death to Americans.

When the first Bundo book was released, British TV comedian John Oliver published a parody version to support gay charities. Its sales outpaced the original and at one point held the number one spot on Amazon.