First there was the man who waded through tons of garbage in a landfill site to find his wife's missing wedding ring. Now a Swedish woman has a lost-and-found story of her own, sure to go down in the annals.
Lena Paahlsson had taken off her wedding ring before a Christmas baking session with her daughters 16 years ago. She was devastated when it went missing from the kitchen counter. Imagine her shocked delight to find the ring all these years later -- impaled on a carrot from her very own garden!
Paahlsson told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper she had looked literally everywhere, even dug up floorboards on her farm in northern Sweden, to find the missing band. She had eventually lost all hope of ever seeing the ring again, until she was picking the last carrots of the season.
The family has since concluded that the ring must have fallen down the sink and been mixed up with composted vegetables.
The irony? The ring no longer fits. But Paahlsson plans to have it resized.
Ever presumed something was missing, only to have it turn up in an unlikely place?
Looking for a fresh start to the new year? For many, 2012 could include a welcome job change...
How would you like to be Stephen Hawking’s assistant? For a mere 25,000 pounds ($39,300 CDN) a year, all you have to do is operate the famed British physicist's complex voicebox.
Following a tracheotomy in 1985, Hawking who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease which left him almost completely paralyzed, can't communicate his genius except through an electronic speech system that interprets "the twitches of his face."
On his website Hawking claims the successful applicant must be "computer literate, ready to travel, and able to repair electronic devices 'with no instruction manual or technical support.'"
A bit of an understatement, I'd say. The wheelchair-mounted computer not only enables Hawking's trademark robotic speech, it can also connect to the Internet over cell phone networks and allows him to control light switches, watch TV and open doors via a universal infrared remote.
Although it may take a genius to rival Hawking's in order to operate the software—not to mention that the pay is a little on the stingy side—but think of the great public service you'd be doing. Geniuses are few and far between. Let's not silence this one.
It might look like an Anne Geddes portrait, but in fact this image of eight little babies in identifcal onesies is the subject of intense national scrutiny. Those babies belong to a couple... in China.
That's right, China -- where couples are still supposed to be limited by the state to have no more than one child. Intended to promote a photography studio, the photo has unwittingly brought to light a double standard whereby rich couples flout the rules to conceive larger families by illegitimate means. In this case: nearly a million yuan ($160,000) to illegally enlist surrogate mothers.
Not only is surrogacy illegal in China, it is frowned upon by the media which has dubbed the mother of eight “babaotai muqin,” or “octomom,” a pejorative American idiom. The China Daily denounced the practice as "something done by wealthy women unwilling to disrupt their careers or ruin their figures."
Another writer, Cai Hong, worried that surrogacy would "give rise to a breeder class of poor women who end up renting their wombs to wealthy people."
Yet the fact remains that women in China, and the world over, are deferring childbearing until it's often too late. And a Daiyunguke surrogacy agency claims business is booming as a result.
Although this particular family's identity hasn't been revealed, the Guangzhou Daily newspaper revealed that the biological mother carried two of her babies, while two surrogates gave birth to three each. Following the birth of the brood, the couple reportedly hired 11 nannies to help care for the children.
With all the recent press, the octo family has, perhaps not surprisingly, gone underground to avoid the media glare. Well, as easy as it is for 11 nannies and eight babies to hide.
Is it time to lift the one-child quota and/or make surrogacy legal in China?
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