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A man put planet Earth up for sale
on a Japanese internet auction site last week. The seller listed
the Earth as "used" and warned that there was a "no-return"
policy. Buy it and you're stuck with it. On the information page,
he explained that god had appeared to him in a dream and told him
to sell the place. People being people, many took it seriously,
reports Rocketnews24, a Japanese news website.
A questioner from Saitama asked: "I love cigars. Is it possible to
sell off just Cuba as a special package item?" Answer: "Thank you
for your question! After placing the winning bid, I think Havana
can be moved to Saitama, Japan."
Q: "Hello. This is a really interesting item! If I buy the Earth
will I become a god?" Answer: "Thank you for your question! This
item can't make you a god."
One questioner, apparently from a different galaxy, asked whether
the Earth could be delivered to his home planet. Q: "Is it
possible to ship this via Altair? Thank you for your time." A:
"Thank you for your question! Because it would take 17 light years
just for the bank transaction to complete, I think you should
forget shipping."
At the time of writing, the price for planet Earth has soared from
69 cents to US2,700. In real estate terms, it may sound cheap, but
think of the maintenance, etc. Do you really want all that
responsibility?
Love this quote from US funnyman Jimmy Kimmel last week about the
cancelled New York marathon: "I don't even know why they bother
running the marathon. We know what's going to happen. Why not just
find a random Kenyan, put a medal around his neck, and save
everyone the trouble?"
The brain is a very strange thing. A hungry reader told me he
carefully separated his burger from the wrapping paper, and then
threw the burger into litter bin. It was not his best day.
Another reader, Janakan Arulkumarasan, told me he was at Cambridge
University when he hurried to the postbox with an important letter
- which he "posted" into the litter bin next to the mailbox.
"Filled with horror, I stuck my arm in the bin, covering my
sleeves with abandoned spaghetti and suchlike, desperately fishing
for the letter," he said. "Moral of the story: going to Cambridge
doesn't make you smart."
I asked regular contributors for similar tales, and the saddest
true story concerned an old man who lived in the UK. Being too old
to learn how to use email, Alf Spence, 91, posted letters and
parcels for two years in what he thought was a postbox. In fact,
it was a receptacle for dog poop.
Alf only discovered the error when a passerby saw him putting an
envelope in the dog poop collection box and stopped him.
The elderly man from North Yorkshire complained that it was the
same colour as the mailbox.
He wrote to the Royal Mail to tell them that they could stop the
hundreds of "missing mail" searches he had instigated over the
past two years. I just hope someone else posted THAT letter for
him.
A judge last week told disgraced French investment banker Jerome
Kerviel that he has to pay back the US$6 BILLION that he lost.
Whoah, someone's going to have to cut back on the designer
coffees. That could take MONTHS, seriously.
You may recall this columnist mentioning a correspondent who is
keen on having more than one wife, and is thus checking out his
options to settle in Asia - Malaysia being his current first
choice. I was wondering how to discourage him (for his own sake)
when I received just what I needed in the shape of a news report
forwarded by Hong Kong reader Esther Cheong.
A man who upset his wife was remotely made impotent, a court in
Zimbabwe heard last week. Tichaona Musavengana, 43, told the judge
that he had done absolutely nothing to upset his wife, other than
bringing home an extra wife as a general upgrade to his marital
situation.
His wife, whose name was Beauty Mapfumo, pledged revenge. Shortly
afterwards, her husband found he had acquired an extreme case of
erectile dysfunction, which basically means he ended up with the
libido (no, that's not a board game, look it up) of overcooked
spaghetti.
The "cursed" man told the judge he has been to numerous doctors in
Harare, both modern and traditional, but nothing has worked. "I'm
now pleading with my wife to undo her 'fix'," he said, according
to Bulowaya24, a news source. "I can pay her two cows."
A man aged 96 has just had a child. It's not fair: if older women
have babies, people tell them off for being irresponsible, but men
just get a pat on the back and a "woohoo". "I didn't take any
performance enhancers," Ramajit Raghav, an ancient bag of bones,
boasted to the Times of India.
The old fella says he is going to have his wife Shakuntala Devi (a
mere child of 52) sterilized so that she won't get pregnant again.
Wise move: otherwise they'd have three kids to put through
college, and a guy's earning power drops off after his first 120
years.
Two hundred yetis live in the unexplored regions of the world,
Russian professor Valentin Sapunov said last week, but are rarely
seen because the lumbering, hair-covered monsters are highly
unsociable. Has he got "yetis" mixed up with "teenagers", I
wonder?
A live shark fell out of the sky on to a golf course in southern
California on Oct 22. A fish expert said it had wounds around its
fin, suggesting that it had been snatched from the sea, lifted
into the sky, then accidentally dropped. Officials are looking for
a very strong falcon or a disappointed-looking Chinese tycoon.
Seventy earthworms were married in an elaborate wedding in Taiwan
sponsored by greenies last month. Romance among earthworms is
easy, since all earthworms are both male and female, just like
1970s pop singers.
Nury Vittachi is an
Asia-based frequent traveler. Send ideas and comments via
www.mrjam.org
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