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Kazakh pensioner ‘back from the dead’
A Kazakh family was recently coming to terms with the violent and mysterious death of their elderly relative, when he just turned up at home.
“When Uncle Aigali walked through the door hale and hearty two months after we’d buried him, my daughter Saule nearly dropped dead of a heart attack,” Esengali Supygaliev told the Azh.kz news site.
The 63-year-old had left home one June morning and didn’t come back. “Aigali had been known to wander off for a week of two before”, Esengali said, so the family waited a month before contacting the police – who in due course asked them to identify a badly-burnt body.
Tea and sympathy
DNA tests showed that these were the mortal remains of Aigali Supygaliev “with 99.2% certainty”, the authorities said, and issued an official death certificate.
In September the family buried Aigali in the Muslim cemetery of Tomarly, their home town just north of the Caspian Sea port of Atyrau.
“We held a wake, and the extended family organised a traditional ‘konil shai’ ceremony,” where friends can share tea and sympathy with the bereaved, Esengali said.
The Tomarly burial plot still waits for Aigali
So, when Aigali walked through the door two months later, he had some explaining to do.
It turns out that he had taken up an offer of work in a nearby village from a man he’d met down the market that fateful day. Job done, four months later Aigali walked all the way back to Tomarly.
Neither the police nor the regional justice department were available for comment on the story. The forensic scientist who carried out the DNA analysis did tell Azh.kz however that she stood by her 99.2% findings, “but you must never forget that other 0.8%”.
The Supygalievs were not pleased that they had already paid for a tombstone, and commissioned a stone shrine over the grave in the Kazakh tradition. They had even returned the pension payments for the two months that Aigali was “dead”, and are considering legal action.
But the family are also contemplating a bigger question. “Who did we bury? Perhaps his family are looking for him,” Esengali concluded ruefully.
Memento mori: Aigali Supygaliev’s death certificateBBC: Reporting by Azim Rakhimov and Martin Morgan
Pittsburgh: the city of hills
Being from Winnipeg, one of the flattest cities in the world, hilly cities have always intrigued me. I always thought San Francisco was the U.S. city with the most hills, but I discovered that Pittsburgh is even hillier than the California city.
The city of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, the United States, is located over an unruly terrain of hills, hollows, valleys and three intersecting rivers. Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, when Pittsburgh was growing as a coal and steel town, factory workers built houses in the hills rising above the flat riverbanks that were lined with factories. In order to commute to work, city officials and residents built staircases along the hillsides, originally of wood and later with concrete that ran up and down throughout the city.
Revered American journalist Ernie Pyle famously wrote about the city in 1937:
Pittsburgh is undoubtedly the cockeyedest city in…
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Please Don’t Step on the Fish! Vietnam’s Unique Flooded Cafe
Animal cafes where you can enjoy a hot cup of coffee and pet cute animals like cats, dogs or even sheep have been springing up all over the world, but Amix Coffee is the only cafe in the world where you can relax as dozens of decorative fish swim at your feet.
Located in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, Amix Coffee features two flooded floors filled with hundreds of fish both small and large. They are both insulated with two layers of plastic tarp and furniture legs are wrapped in cotton to minimize friction and prevent damage to the tarp. Each floor covers an area of 20 square meters and the water level is up to 25 centimeters deep. In order to gain access to these man-made ponds full of colorful fish, visitors are required to take off their shoes and clean their feet. They can then enjoy a wide range of refreshments and snacks as Japanese carp and other small fish swim at their feet.
Amix Coffee is the brainchild of 23-year-old Nguyen Duoc Hoa, who wanted to take the concept of animal cafes to a whole new level. However, making her idea a reality wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. Flooding the first and second floor of the Amix Coffee building with around 10,000 liters of water and keeping it clean at all times proved challenging, but he eventually came up with viable solutions.
The cafe uses a triple filtration system to keep the water crystal clear at all times, and pumps that change between a quarter and half of the water on each floor to maintain optimum conditions for the fish. However, preventing patrons from stressing the fish too much has proved much more difficult.
Hoa told Spanish news agency EFE that families with small children make up an important part of the clientele, and while most of them don’t cause problems, some parents let their kids run after the fish, which isn’t allowed.
“Most families don’t cause any problems, but there have been some naughty children who try to catch the fish, and their parents don’t say anything. We have had to invite them to leave”, Hoa said.
The first floor of Amix Coffee is home to small decorative fish, while the second one features large Japanese carp weighing around 300 grams each. The young owner told Saigoneer that in the future he plans to buy more Japanese carp to replace the smaller species because they are more prone to death due to shock.
While feedback to Ho Chi Minh’s flooded cafes has been generally positive, it has received its share of criticism as well. Some people believe that subjecting the fish to unnecessary stress and having them live in unsanitary conditions for the sole purpose of providing entertainment to visitors is an abhorrent crime.
Chinese City May Get Fake Moon
An aerospace executive in China has announced plans to launch a satellite which would serve as an artificial moon designed to illuminate a city at night. The unorthodox idea was reportedly revealed by Wu Chunfeng, who heads one of the main contractors for the Chinese space agency, at a conference last week. According to him, the faux moon will hover over the city of Chengdu emitting a “dusk-like glow” which would eliminate the need for street lights.
The illumination from the satellite, he said, will be adjustable and could cover an area of land ranging from five to fifty miles in diameter. While the idea may sound fanciful to some, Chungfeng appears to be quite serious about the endeavor, explaining that the concept has been tested extensively for the last few years and now looks to be almost fully feasible. With that in mind, the executive is eying a 2020 launch for the fake moon.
Lest one have concerns about how the illumination will impact wildlife in the area, an aerospace professor was quick to assure Chinese media that it will not be a problem thanks to its similarity in intensity to twilight. Be that as it may, whether the residents of Chengdu want another moon is another matter altogether. Alas, they probably won’t have much of a say in the decision, so hopefully they won’t mind living under the light of a fake moon.
Mickey Mouse expelled from Egypt schools
Children in a province north of Cairo may face the new school year without familiar Disney characters to cheer them up, it’s reported.
The governor of Qalyubia has decreed that cartoon images of Mickey Mouse and his friends on the walls of pre-schools must be replaced by “military heroes”, the Youm7 news site reports.
“We need to replace pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with images of famous Egyptians and military martyrs, so that children will look up to them as role models. These characters are US-made, whereas we have our own noble figures who can deepen children’s patriotism and love of country,” Alaa Abdul-Halim Mohammed Marzouk told reporters.
A Ministry of Education official in Qalyubia told Youm7 that a committee would see how the governor’s orders should be implemented across the whole province.
The Egyptian government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi – a former general – is keen to raise the profile of the military in all spheres of public life, in particular education.
Soldiers killed in clashes with Islamist extremists in the Sinai Peninsula are lauded as “martyrs” in the official media, and their families are honoured at official ceremonies.
But Governor Marzouk’s decree has come in for mockery on social media, with many users arguing that the authorities need to focus more on crammed classrooms and old-fashioned teaching methods.
“I don’t know what to say. I learned to read before going to school because of the Mickey magazine, which I still read now,” tweeted one users, referring to a comic that puts Disney characters in an Egyptian setting.
Journalist Mohamed Ragab wrote “Somebody should tell His Highness the Governor that his decision has turned him into a cartoon character.”
Some objected to “hanging photos of the dead on the school walls”, asking “what have our children done to deserve this?”
But a few people did applaud the initiative. “It’s good that we teach our children about the martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the people of Egypt. My regards to the governor of Qalyubia,” was one online comment.
Disney characters may strike a particular raw nerve with the Egyptian authorities, London’s Al-Araby Al-Jadeed news site reports. A Facebook user was sentenced to three years in jail in 2015 for posting a photoshopped image of President Sisi with Mickey Mouse ears.
BBC
The Dark Hedges
The Dark Hedges is an avenue of beech trees along Bregagh Road between Armoy and Stranocum in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The trees form an atmospheric tunnel that has been used as a location in HBO’s popular television series Game of Thrones, which has resulted in the avenue becoming a tourist attraction.
In about 1775 James Stuart built a new house, named Gracehill House after his wife Grace Lynd. Over 150 beech trees were planted along the entrance road to the estate, to create an imposing approach.
According to legend, the hedges are visited by a ghost called the Grey Lady, who travels the road and flits across it from tree to tree. She is claimed to be either the spirit of James Stuart’s daughter (named “Cross Peggy”) or one of the house’s maids who died mysteriously, or a spirit from an abandoned graveyard beneath the fields, who on Halloween…
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