- Notes
& Shorts from around the world
Railway birth
Julie Kowalska has become
the second woman ever to give birth on the London Underground.
The Polish citizen went into labour on the Jubilee Line, was
helped off the train at Kingsbury station and delivered a daughter
in the station supervisor’s office. The last birth on the
Tube was in 1924, at Elephant and Castle.
Prison haven
An Italian convict who was released early persuaded police to
readmit him to prison, because he couldn’t stand living
with his parents. Guido Beneventi, 30, had his sentence for theft
reduced on condition that he stayed at the family home in Palermo.
Before long, however, he appeared at a police station begging
to be arrested. “You are my saviours,” he told officers.
“My parents spent all their time telling me how useless
I am and ordering me to do housework. It was like being a child
again.”
Neither in nor out
“Before Christmas we purchased a new set of decorative lights,
which bore, in four languages, the message: ‘For indoor
and outdoor use only.’ I found this instruction worrying
for it suggests that, at exactly the conjunction between indoors
and outdoors, there is a mysterious anomaly in the space-time
continuum, where the use of these lights might be dangerous.
I think we should be told more.” - from David L. Stevens,
Cheltenham, U.K.
Twitcher confounded
Eager birdwatchers will travel miles to see a rare species, but
sometimes, as Janet Davies of Helston in Cornwall found to her
cost, it’s better to stay at home. She’d gone all the
way to the wilds of northern Norway in a vain search for the
elusive Arctic dwelling snow bunting. Hardly had she returned
home when she spotted one of the rare birds sitting on her garden
fence. Just down the road in St. Ives, there was an extremely
rare sighting of the magnificent snowy owl, yet another Arctic
visitor to Cornwall.
Recyclable house
A paper house has been designed to provide affordable, environmentally
friendly shelter to refugees. The Universal World House is built
of cellulose recovered from recycled paper then soaked in resin,
and weighs barely 800kg, less than a VW Golf. Each $5,500 house
has eight built-in beds, a shower, a toilet and a verandah.
Inventor Gerd Niemoeller says his design could almost instantly
house the displaced and urban poor. “The number of refugees
living in improvised housing is going to grow with climate change.
We offer an alternative.”
Bons Mots
“I have never been in a rich man’s house which would
not have looked better for having a bonfire made outside of it
of nine tenths of all that it contained.” - English designer,
William Morris
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