Tuesday, January 17, 2006

In the news...

The Telegraph publishes the (alleged) picture of Lady Jane Grey.
Also in the Telegraph, this unusual story from India:
Raju Raghuvanshi, believed by friends and family to have died in prison, came home this month after a short jail sentence to be greeted by shouts of "Help!Ghost!" He has now enlisted the help of police to try to convince them that he is alive.
Mr Raghuvanshi was sent to prison in October for a minor tax infraction. He fell ill and was transferred to a prison hospital in another district. Word spread that he had died and that his body had been cremated because no one had retrieved it.
When he returned to Katra, about 400 miles from Delhi, his family ostracised him and neighbours bolted their doors. The frosty reception left him bewildered.
"My family thinks I am dead," he said yesterday. "They will not permit me to enter my home because they think I am a ghost." The best proof he had - that his feet were still properly attached, not turned backward as ghosts' feet are thought to be - was dismissed.
Mr Raghuvanshi said his brothers even "argued that they had completed all religious
death ceremonies" and he should not have come back to haunt them.

The Times reports on a parrot who spilled the beans on an affair:
WHEN Chris Taylor’s best friend repeatedly mentioned the name Gary, his suspicions were aroused. He didn’t know a Gary.
And, when the best friend made slurpy kissing noises every time he heard the name Gary on television, Chris wondered if Ziggy was trying to tell him something about some other pretty boy. The penny dropped when, one romantic evening as Mr Taylor cuddled his girlfriend Suzy Collins on the sofa, Ziggy blurted out: “I love you, Gary.”
What gave the game away was that Ziggy spoke the fatal phrase in Ms Collins’s voice. Even by the standards of African grey parrots, Ziggy is a mimic and a half, and from his cage in the corner he had heard every bill and coo of a secret love affair.
A chill ran down Mr Taylor’s spine. He turned to Suzy, whose cheeks had flushed to beetroot. As she dissolved in tears she was forced to admit to a month-long fling with Gary, some of their intimacies conducted in Mr Taylor’s home while he was out at work, but Ziggy wasn’t. She could not deny it; every time her mobile phone had rung, Ziggy had piped up in perfect imitation of her: “Hiya Gary.”

ANSA has a nice piece about Georg Ratzinger:
The pope's brother is nostalgic for the days when he and his sibling used to play Bach to each other, eat food out of cans and wash up together afterwards .
Monsignor Georg Ratzinger has fond memories of when he and his younger brother used to spend spare hours in a house in Pentling, a small Bavarian village which Benedict XVI is said to still consider home .
"We were never great cooks, which is why we often ate canned food," Ratzinger senior admitted in an interview with Corriere della Sera's magazine supplement Style
.

No comments: