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Hold that yawn!

The presentation, ‘Terrorism Awareness and Prevention’, claims to educate the public on recognizing potential threats in any environment including at work and in the community as well as how to report them.

“Signs will become particularly evident in a person’s eyes, face, neck and body movements.” If an individual has a cold stare, “trance-like gaze” or wide “flashbulb eyes,” he may be a terrorist. If they seem to exaggerate yawning in conversation, repeatedly touch their face or ears, or excessively watch a clock or fidget, these may be indicators of a terrorist. If they pace, tremble, perspire or have goose bumps, the department’s report states that these also may be indicators.

“These indicators are not fool-proof. They are not guarantees of terrorist activities or the lack thereof,” the report says. All we can say is that we see a lot of overworked Homeland Security staff who can now frisk, check, question various unsuspecting people who either yawned or scratched an itch on the face or had goose bumps from just the prospects of being frisked by one of those fellows.

Wealth in nuggets

THIS lady certainly lucked out with her possession of a chicken nugget that resembles former US president George Washington.

Rebekah Speight, of Dakota City, sold the McNugget for $8,100 at on online auction on eBay and contributed the money to fund her church summer camp.

On a visit to a Sioux City McDonald’s three years ago, she purchased the nuggets for her children and was about to trash a couple of uneaten ones when she noticed that one of them had an uncanny resemblance to Washington.

Speight stashed the McNugget in her freezer till she decided to pull it out and leverage its resemblance to Washington, to raise some moolah

Penny wise...

We have all been taught by our parents to be parsimonious but this Chinese businessman could well be the country’s modern-day Uncle Scrooge.

Sun Lin, who owns a cargo firm in China, bought himself three flatbed trucks but was in no mood to pay three separate road taxes or hire three drivers to take the vehicles back to his factory. The stingy man decided to save himself some money by loading two trucks atop each other and piling them onto the larger vehicle!

He then tried to drive the heavy load more than 100 miles to his trucking yard in the Anhui province, central China causing a traffic pile-up en-route, before being nabbed by an alert and very startled cop. The man shelled out £500 for his ingenious plan and is still unconvinced it was bad strategy.

“I wasn’t going to pay three sets of tolls or for more drivers so I got the seller to use a crane to load them on top of each other. They were perfectly safe until the police interfered.”

Spitting image

US President Barack Obama’s face might be his fortune – he raised $5 million last weekend alone through fans who forked out between $2,500 and $38,500 for face time with him -- but a poor car mechanic who is his mirror image does not have the same lady luck beside him.

32-year-old Carlos Alberto Perez was announced winner of the best look-alike of the President at a contest in Cartagena, Colombia but was put off by the prize money which, he griped, was not even enough to cover his fare back home.

Perez was pushed into the contest by his boss and took the two-day trip to the contest venue where judges gave him the award because his head resembles that of the President. His judges referred to the look: “There is part of Obama’s head like a little ball, in the back, and Carlos has the profile - he looks like Obama from kilometres away.”

His looks certainly don’t get him a free air ticket back to his home town though.....

—sudhamenon2006@gmail.com

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