Boxing Kargaroo

There was non-political news coming from the National Capital yesterday, David Striegl 25, was jogging up Mt Ainslie in his lunch-hour when he had an encounter with a large kangaroo. He was king hit from nowhere and has a black eye to prove it. He didn't see him coming until it was too late - he heard something from his left side, turned around and the kangaroo swiped him across the face, leaving deep scratches. Then it threw a punch that knocked him out. Luckily a passing motorist spotted the unconscious man and took him to hospital where after a tetanus shot, he was allowed to go home. He's back in the office today with a new nickname - Skip.

Last year there was another unprovoked incident with a Kangaroo in Canberra in a home invasion. A nine footer terrified its owners when it came in the window and jumped on the owner and his wife who were in bed and gouged holes in their furniture. The owner, Mr Ettlin wrestled with the animal and finally dragged it out of the house. "My initial thought when I was half awake was: it's a llunatic ninja coming through the window" he said at the time.

Fast Food

A health food blogger who lives in Denver, Colorado, wanted to see what happened when she left a McDonald's Happy Meal on a shelf, uncovered, in her home for 12 months. The food should have decomposed, but it didn't, it looks almost the same.

Click to enlarge image

When it was pointed out that the air in the Rocky Mountains has little moisture, which speeds up decompotion, she said she had the windows open many times, but the flies and insects just wouldn't go near the food. She said "If flies ignore a Happy Meal and microbes don't decompost it, then your child's body can't properly metabolise it either. Now you know why it's called junk food".

David Smith, a former rugy player used to weigh 15 stone until a ruptured Achilles tendon forced him to leave the Army. Twleve years later at age 38, he weighed nearly 20 stone and ate lots of Big Macs with extra chips before dinner.

These two pictures of visceral fat are interesting, I'd never heard of it before. It's the internal fatty tissue that wraps itself around the heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas and streaks through the muscles. And it's very dangerous - it looks like an inert lump of lard but it's constantly pumping poisons into the bloodstream. When he changed to a low fat diet and started moderate exercise, almost a litre of this horrible stuff simply disappeared.

I must admit I love McDonald hamburgers, fries and my favourite - hot applie pie. But now that I'm watching my weight, they are no longer on the menue. It's just a shame that most fast foods taste so darned good - fatty, unhealthy food is simply very hard to resist.

St Patrick's Day 2010

St Patrick's Day was first celebrated in Sydney in 1810 when the NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie provided entertainment for Irish convicts. We love the Irish and tonight, the Sydney Opera House will turn green and there will be much revelry in and around The Rocks and in other Irish pubs across the country, where large amounts of Guinness will be consumed.


But we don't know anything about the famous Saint. The real St Patrick wasn't even Irish, he was born in Britain around 390 AD to a well-heeled family who had a town house, a country house and lots of slaves.

He showed no interest in Christianity as a young boy but when he turned 16, he was kidnapped and sent overseas to look after sheep as a slave in the mountains of Ireland for seven years. While he was there he had a religious experience and became deeply devout. In a dream, a voice told him to escape and he returned to England on a pirate ship. After being reuninted with his family, the voice told him to go back to Ireland, which he did, and spent the rest of his life converting the Irish to Christianity. When he died on 17th March 461, Patrick was mainly forgotton but slowly, mythology about him grew and centuries later, he was honoured as the Patron Saint of Ireland.

In Ireland on St Patrick's Day, it's traditional for revelers to wear a shamrock. St Patrick chose the shamrock to explain the holy trinity, the Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit. But after a very long winter, there are few authentic shamrocks to be found this year so shamrock sellers are resorting to other three-leaf clovers which according to the Irish Times, are "bogus shamrocks". Botanists say that there's nothing unique about the Irish shamrocks, most species can be found throughout Europe. St Patrick got the credit for banishing all the snakes and it's true that no snakes exist in Ireland today but they never did, it's simply too cold for them to survive.

Up until the 1970's, St Patrick's Day in Ireland was a minor religious holiday until the Americans re-invented it. Irish soldiers fighting with the British in the US Revolutionary War held the first St Patrick's Day parade in New York in 1762. In 1962 Chicago decided to dye a portion of their river green, a unique event held for the past 40 years.

The Sydney 2010 St Patrick's Parade will be held this Saturday, 21st March leaving the Town Hall and making its way to Hyde Park where a family day has been organised. Food stalls will serve Irish food and beverages, which will naturally include a cold glass of Guinness.

Fattest Woman in the World

Donna Simpson 42 from New Jersey wants to become the fattest woman in the world - she already weighs 43 stone but wants to nearly double that by reaching her goal weight of 1,000 lbs (71.4 stone). And the tragedy is that she insists she is healthy and is the parent of a small child. She needed a team of 30 medics to deliver her daughter in 2007 during a high-risk Caesarean birth.

She can only walk a few steps before she has to sit down and uses a scooter to shop. She has a partner Philippe 49 who encourages her to eat more. They met on a plus-size dating site and says he is a fat-admirer but only weighs 150 lbs. To achieve her goal weight she will eat up to 12,000 calories a day which costs a lot of money, in fact she spends $750 a week on food so where does the money come from? She runs a website where men pay to watch her eat.

Donna's mother made huge meals for all her children and gave them lots of treats so by the time Donna was nine, she weighed 13 stone. When her mother died, her father remarried a woman who put Donna and her brothers on a strict diet. From the ages of 14 and 18, Donna started taking diet pills and slimmed down to 11 stone but found being thin didn't make her happy. She was miserable all the time because she couldn't stop thinking about food. When the weight came back "I felt like who I was meant to be" she said.

When she was 19 she met her husband who was a chef at a steak restaurant. He came home at 2am with left-overs and they would stay up and eat huge piles of steak, mashed potatoes and gravy. When she was 27 she fell pregnant with her eldest son Devin and her marriage ended and by the age of 31, she weighed 43 stone. She lost 5 stone in six months and was due to have a gastric band operation but her close friend died during a similar operation and she called it off.

Then Donna discovered a website for obese women, she joined up and once she admitted her real size, she was flooded with emails from men - they wanted her to get fatter and sent her protein shakes through the post to help her along.

So Donna continues on her journey to become the fattest woman in the world and she has a huge incentive - men pay to watch her eat.

Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe

A seventy-year-old, six-ton bull elephant dies of natural causes and for the starving people of Zimbabwe, it's the answer to their prayers.






Hungry people arrive from all directions and it took just one hour and 47 minutes for them to cut the meat away from the body - even his trunk and ears - and when there was nothing left but the skeleton, they took his bones away to boil for soup.

Conditions are expected to get worse this year after the collapse of agriculture caused by President Mugabe's violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms since 2000. Harvests for this year will produce less than a third of the required amount to feed the whole country.

Just after dawn, a villager on a bike spotted the dead animal miles from anywhere and within 15 minutes, people from every direction arrived. The women formed a ring around the elephant and the men stood inside, fighting to get at the meat.

Some of the meat was eaten straight away but most was dried on washing lines and stored to eat later. There were celebrations in surrounding villages for the next two nights.

This is how the people survive under President Mugabe.

Nothing left

The Exorcist

Exorcist Father Gabirele Amorth 85, says the devil is at work in the Vatican. He's been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession. He's convinced that sex abuse scandals are proof that the devil is at work inside the Vatican and made the extraordinary comment that there are cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon.


Father Amorth has just published Memoirs of an Exorcist, a series of interviews with Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti. But Father Jose Antonio Cucurull, a Rome-based exorcist said that he had "gone well beyond the evidence" in making these claims.



Father Amorth told La Repubblica that the devil is "pure spirit", invisible and manifests himself with blasphemies and afflictions in the person he possesses. "He can remain hidden or speak in different languages, transform himself or appear to be agreeable. At time he makes fun of me" he said.


He said that once it took six or seven of his assistants to hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass which he kept in a bag. "Anything can come out of their mouths - finger-length pieces or iron, but also rose petals".



He hopes that every diocese would eventually have a resident exorcist. Under Church Canon Law, any priest can perform exorcisms but in practice they are crried out by a chosen few trained in the rites. He said the 1973 film The Exorcist, although exaggerated, offered a substantially exact picture of possession.

Starlings fall out of the sky in Somerset

Something weird happened last Sunday afternoon in Somerset. More than 100 starlings fell out of the sky and landed dead and dying into Julie Knight's front garden. Every bird had blood oozing from its beak and curled up claws. About 70 were dead when they hit the ground but some were still flapping until the RSPCA put them out of their misery.

Experts have no idea what happened, there are lots of theories, but none that make any sense. Their best bet is that the flock was chased by a bird of prey and hit the ground as they changed direction. But a neighbour said they were dead or dying before they hit the ground.

Lady Scott from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said 'This is one of the oddest things I've ever heard about, we've certainly never come across anything similar. Post mortems carried out on the starling proved inconclusive. They were all found to have physical injuries with most suffering either broken wings or a shattered beak but no underlying health problems or toxins were found which could explain their sudden deaths.

An RSPCA spokesman said the incident still remains a mystery.