Durban – There were amazing scenes at… is almost a fitting intro for some of the weird, whacky and thoroughly odd stories of 2022. Reporters from the Independent on Saturday and Sunday Tribune contributed the stories that tickled them pink this year.
Sex toys on the N2
Close to home, a box of adult toys caused a road accident on the N2 near Ballito in July.
Medi Response paramedics said a car driving behind a light delivery vehicle transporting the toys on a trailer was hit by a full box of the toys which came loose from the trailer.
Pictures of the accident scene showed the toys strewn all over the freeway.
The vehicle that was struck lost control and crashed. No serious injuries were reported but the accident became the talk of the North Coast.
Murky miracle man
If you have a wish to dine with the angels or to see God in the flesh on Christmas Day, a miracle man in Limpopo promises to make it happen for at least R20 000.
Pastor MS Budeli set tongues wagging with a poster in November inviting people to a special service where he would allegedly be performing miracles.
Prayers for singles who wish to find a spouse the next day would cost R10 000, cancellation of debt R5 000, while a guaranteed win in the Aviator game cost R300 000. In a country ridden with crime, Budeli promises protection for criminals for R20 000.
The Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities caught wind of Budeli’s plans and is hot on his heels.
Cop’s hidden charges
In a country where citizens are crying out for police who go the extra mile, warrant officer Claude Peter Ince, based at Saps Bellair, lifted his level of commitment when he took a fraud suspect, who was in custody at the time, home for a shower. Unfortunately, Ince’s caring nature did not wash with his colleagues and the law. It emerged at the Durban Specialised Commercialised Court in October that it was allegedly all part of Ince’s plan to extort money from the suspect. Ince’s fee for the shower and shampoo was apparently R300.
Brushing up the budget
In November, the Department of Water and Sanitation allegedly celebrated World Toilet Day by handing out toilet rolls and toilet brushes to residents of Douglas in the Northern Cape.
However, the DA pooh-poohed the efforts, saying it was a slap in the face for the residents, who don’t have toilets. It said that instead of handouts, the government should have used the money to eradicate bucket toilets. However, the government’s official website, gov.co.za, didn’t seem to have any information on the event.
Trussed up with lettuce
Imagine having a shelf life shorter than an iceberg lettuce. That’s the fate of former British prime minister Liz Truss when she resigned in October.
The joke was played out by journalists at the Daily Star, who set up the competition after an opinion piece in the Telegraph on the Sunday. It stated that if Truss didn’t make certain policy changes, her shelf life would be no longer than that of a lettuce. Journalists went out and bought an iceberg lettuce, at the cost of 59p (about R10,) at Tesco and live-streamed it from their offices that week. On day six, it was crowned the winner, complete with a gold crown.
That really got the Twitter memes flying. Lettuces were projected onto the Houses of Parliament, a Marvel comics-style Lettucehead dragged off a recalcitrant Truss, and the bust of Truss was done as a lettuce.
Pricey jeans
The world’s oldest pair of jeans, work pants pulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, sold for $114 000 (about R1.9m) in December. The white, heavy-duty miner’s pants, with a five-button fly, were among 270 Gold Rush-era artefacts that sold for nearly $1 million in Reno. There’s disagreement about whether the pricey pants have any ties to the father of modern-day blue jeans, Levi Strauss, as they predate by 16 years the first pair officially manufactured by his San Francisco Levi Strauss & Co. in 1873, although the design is similar.
Bit it’s upside down
And then a famed piece of modern art has been hanging upside down for more than 75 years. But one of Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian’s most important works will remain that way in case the strips used in the artwork come loose.
The picture was created in 1941 and first put on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1945. Since 1980, it’s been hung in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen art collection in Dusseldorf, Germany.
At an event for the artist’s anniversary exhibition in November, curator Susanne Meyer-Buser revealed its secret. She had come across a photo from Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after his death in 1944, and the picture could be seen on the easel in a different orientation: the denser stripes on the upper edge.
A Pakistani pigeon was arrested by Indian law enforcement on suspicion of being a spy. The bird flew over the contentious border and was apprehended because of a suspicious ring around its ankle printed with the cellphone number of the pigeon’s owner. After a thorough investigation, the pigeon was deemed not a threat to national security and was set free. “It was just an innocent bird,” police told Reuters. This wasn’t the first case of avian espionage in the area: in 2016, a pigeon was taken into Indian custody after it was found with a note threatening Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
‘Russian warship, go f*** yourself’
On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Russian warships surrounded a small Ukrainian border garrison on Zmiinyi Island, better known as Snake Island, a rocky outcrop in the Black Sea in a strategically important spot near the Danube Delta.
On an open shipping channel, Russian commanders aboard the flagship cruiser, the Moskva, ordered the Ukrainians to surrender.
But the Ukrainians, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, were having none of it.
The exchange went as follows ‒ in Russian.
Russian warship: “Snake Island, I, Russian warship, repeat the offer: put down your arms and surrender, or you will be bombed. Have you understood me? Do you copy?”
Ukrainian 1 to Ukrainian 2: “That’s it, then. Or, do we need to f*** them back off?”
Ukrainian 2 to Ukrainian 1: “Might as well.”
Ukrainian 1: “Russian warship, go f*** yourself.”
That was the last communique from the island.
The phrase, said by border guard Roman Hrybov, became widely adopted as memes and at protests across the world against the Russian invasion and helped solidify Ukrainian resistance to the Russian attack.
Initially, it was thought the men died defending Snake Island, but it was later realised they were captured and by March, had been returned to Kyiv as part of a prisoner swop. Hrybov was awarded a medal for his actions.
On April 12, the Ukrainian post office issued a stamp of a mythical Ukrainian soldier on a rocky outcrop, showing the Moskva the middle finger. The stamps were so popular there were queues around the block in Kyiv to buy them, and they were rationed to 16 a customer. Hrybov signed some of them.
The Moskva was critically damaged by two Ukrainian missiles, although Russia claims it was mechanical failure. The ship sank the next day. It is not known how many of the more than 500 Russian sailors on the ship survived.
Saved by the celery
A celery stalk helped a New Hampshire man find his wife’s wedding rings in a 20-ton trash trailer after the jewellery had been wrapped in a napkin he had accidentally thrown away.
In November, Kevin Butler had taken the trash to a transfer station in Windham. Several hours later, he returned and asked for help in finding the rings amid the piles of garbage.
Supervisor Dennis Senibaldi reviewed surveillance video to see when Butler arrived and where he threw it out. They used an excavator to start scooping up trash from the trailer. After about five or six scoops, they saw a white bag with a tell-tale clue.
“One of the things he said was inside was celery stalks, and I could see a celery stalk sticking out the side of the bag,” Senibaldi said. At the very bottom of the bag, underneath some carrot or sweet potato peelings, there was a napkin ‒ and the rings.
Extreme Nose picking
And finally, kids aren’t the only ones who pick their nose and eat what they dig up. An aye-aye ‒ a type of lemur ‒ was earlier this year spotted on camera “digging for gold”. And it did so with its 8cm-long middle finger, typically used in the animals’ nocturnal hunts for insects in logs. When inserted in an aye-aye’s nose, the finger can reach all the way to its throat. As for why aye-ayes practise extreme nose picking, scientists aren’t sure.
The Independent on Saturday
