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Odds and Ends
By Devin D. O'Leary
APRIL 19, 1999:
Dateline: Japan--Thanks to a quick-thinking emergency medical
worker and a Hoover, an 80-year-old Japanese man was saved from
choking last Saturday night. The suburban Osaka senior was eating
sukiyaki with his family when he got some "devil's tongue"--a
spongy, gray paste made from alum root--stuck in his throat. The
man fell unconscious, and his family immediately called the emergency
rescue dispatch. The dispatcher who took the family's desperate
call advised them of several ways to save grandpa. When all traditional
methods failed, the dispatcher instructed the man's 25-year-old
granddaughter on the proper way to insert a vacuum cleaner tube
into the choking man's mouth. The granddaughter then flipped on
the switch and sucked out the devil's tongue. "The use of
the vacuum cleaner was the absolute last resort," assured
a local fire official.
Dateline: Germany--Some gnomenapping thieves have returned
13 sprightly statues to a German widow after she pleaded for their
return in a newspaper advertisement. After a baker's dozen of
Erna V.'s best garden gnomes went missing, the 75-year-old took
out an advertisement in Frankfurt's Bild newspaper. "My
late husband collected them," Erna announced. "Please
bring them back." Over the Easter holiday, the 13 plaster
pipsqueaks reappeared in her garden.
Dateline: Louisiana--A masked man--who under nearly all
religious doctrines is assured a place in Hell--held 100 worshippers
at gunpoint in a Metairie, La., church on Easter Sunday while
he robbed them of their cash and driver's licenses. The ski masked
bandit entered the New Orleans Kingdom Hall, a Jehovah's Witness
congregation, 15 minutes after services began. The robber held
a gun to one member's head and ordered everybody to lie on the
floor. A few members of the congregation walked through the hall
collecting some $1,200 in cash for the robber. "The only
complaint he had was that there were too many one dollar bills,"
reported Vicky Wagner, a member of the church's board of elders.
After the robber left, the congregation offered prayers of thanks
that nobody was hurt and then called police.
Dateline: California--Jesus Christ, meanwhile, was busy
performing Easter miracles in a California Buddhist temple in
a show of misplaced religious favoritism. Monks at the Buddhist
Purple Lotus University some 22 miles east of San Francisco believe
that an image of Jesus has appeared on a bumpy, unfinished concrete
wall on their campus. The image, which is said to come and go,
first appeared on the wall two years ago. Many at the temple felt
it was either the face of the Virgin Mary or Kuan Yin, the Buddhist
goddess of mercy. Over Easter, however, a group of Roman Catholic
visitors saw the image and quickly declared it to be the face
of Jesus Christ. Now the school's six monks and 11 students have
set up an altar with grapes, apples and incense in front of the
wall, and visitors are beginning to arrive to have a look at the
stucco Jesus.
Dateline: Massachusetts--Some 45 years ago, 12-year-old
Bill Burrows stuffed a message in a bottle and tossed it into
the seas off Cape Cod Bay. The youngster had hoped his missive
would travel all the way to Europe or China. Last Saturday, Christian
and Rachel Herder found Burrows' green screwtop bottle and read
the note inside which said, "Will the person who finds this
let me know where and when it was picked up? My name is William
Burrows, 212 Lincoln Street, Worcester, Mass." Unfortunately,
the Herders found the bottle near the tip of Sandy Neck beach
in Cape Cod Bay--several miles from the place where it was launched
nearly half a century ago. "I vaguely remember doing it,"
said 57-year-old William Burrows, who was eventually located in
Longmeadow, Mass.
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