Year: 2018

Butchers Demand Protection from Radical Vegans

Markozen.com Food, Offbeat

French butchers have written to the government asking for protection against militant vegans, accusing them of trying to shut down the country’s traditional meat-eating culture.

Shops have been stoned or defaced with anti-meat graffiti and stickers, the French Federation of Butchers says.

Over the last few months, 15 shops were splashed with fake blood.

Federation chief Jean-François Guihard said in the letter that such attacks were a form of terrorism.

“It’s terror that these people are seeking to sow, in their aim of making a whole section of French culture disappear,” he wrote.

Vegans wanted to “impose on the immense majority of people their lifestyle, or even their ideology”.

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“The vegan way of life has been over-hyped in the media,” Mr Guihard said, contributing to intolerance.

French butchers have an exalted place in traditional French life but incidents like these are not entirely new, BBC Paris correspondent Lucy Williamson reports.

One shopkeeper described his locks being glued shut 20 years ago.

As a result of a reduction in meat sales, farmers’ groups have appealed to President Emmanuel Macron’s government in recent weeks to prevent measures that they perceive as anti-meat.

Food makers want to stop the use of the terms “steak”, “fillet”, “bacon” and “sausage” for non-meat products.

A proposal to require schools to introduce a weekly vegetarian meal was rejected in parliament.

 

Sally the Sleuth

Markozen.com Cartoons

Sally the Sleuth, no last name given, only referred to her as Sally or Miss Sally, was a plainclothes detective with the police in an unnamed city.

Often working undercover (or barely covered) an experienced investigator, she was an expert shot as well as being adept at judo.

Her supervisor was known only as The Chief.

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Sally the Sleuth first appeared not in the comics, or as a newspaper strip, but in the pages of pulp magazine Spicy Detective Stories in November of 1934, she was drawn by Adolphe Barreaux.

Consisting of 4 to 6 black and white pages all of her spicy adventures were just an excuse to get her out of the plainclothes and stripped down to her unmentionables and captured by the villain so that by the last page she could be saved by the Chief.

When Crime Stories became the big thing in comics in the late 40s and early 50s Trojan brought back Sally in the pages of Crime Smashers, in the four color format however she was a much better detective, actually doing some sleuthing, and was able to keep her clothing on for whole stories.

Though there generally was still a lot of leg and bare shoulders.

Pretty risque for the 1930’s.

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Man Caught Driving Car While Sitting on a Metal Bucket and Steering with Pliers

Markozen.com Offbeat

If you thought you needed a steering wheel to actually drive a car, let this story be an example of the opposite. A man in Norfolk, England, was really caught by police driving a battered car by using a metal bucket as a car seat and pliers for steering.

You might think that this guy was extremely unfortunate to get pulled over by cops, but you’d be wrong. What first caught the attention of police officers patrolling the streets of King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, was the battered state of the car this man was driving. It had no front wing, bumper or headlights and to top it all off, it also had a flat tire. Hardly what you’d call a roadworthy vehicle, but this was nothing  compared to what awaited the officers inside.

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The motorist behind the, well, definitely not steering wheel of this deplorable-looking car was actually sitting on an upside down metal bucket and steering the vehicle with a pair of metal pliers. There was no RPM meter or speedometer to speak of, in fact, the thing barely had any dashboard. But hey, it worked, so who needs that stuff anyway?

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As you can imagine, the policemen themselves were quite shocked by the sight, and while their subsequent social media post didn’t mention what charges the driver faced, they did say that there were “too many offences to mention”.

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Norfolk police tweeted photos of the car in its shocking state on Twitter, and they soon went viral, attracting all kinds of tongue-in-cheek comments. One person wrote that the car “gives a whole new meaning to the word bucket seat”, while another called it “ingeniously unbelievable”.

Aliens Blamed for Abducted Ducks

Markozen.com Paranormal

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An Australian woman who had eight of her ducks go missing under mysterious circumstances suspects that aliens may be to blame! Desi Friend explained to a local newspaper that the weirdness occurred back in May when “over the course of two weeks, one by one they disappeared into thin air.” The systematic strangeness was made all the more perplexing by the fact that there were no signs of forced entry at the enclosure nor clues left behind by whatever caused the ducks’ departure.

“A wild dog couldn’t have got past my dog and would have left feathers or a mess,” she mused, “and a snake couldn’t have eaten eight ducks in three weeks.” Friend also noted that the birds could not have simply flown away because their wings had been clipped. Meanwhile, the other animals residing in the enclosure, like chickens and a rooster, remained untouched, suggesting that something was specifically targeting the ducks.

With all that in mind, Friend believes that there was one potential culprit that could have been behind the sophisticated operation: aliens. Incredibly, part of her reasoning for this rather fantastic conclusion lies in the perceived quality of the birds that were taken. “Whoever has taken the ducks has taken all the good ducks,” she lamented, “so it must be alien forces, that have left me my two worst ducks.” While one might worry about what became of the abducted ducks, we can’t help but feel a bit bad for the pair who were left behind to wonder why they weren’t good enough to take.