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March 29th, 2024

Diversions

Took It Too Far

News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

By News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

Published Jan.9, 2015

Took It Too Far

Just Possibly Racist: One of the questions offered in testing by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) school district for high school biology in November sought students' understanding of dominant and recessive genes with this puzzle: "LaShamanda has a heterozygous big bootie, the dominant trait. Her man Fontavius has a small bootie which is recessive. They get married and have a baby named LaPrincess. What is the probability that LaPrincess will inherit her mama's big bootie?" (Charlotte TV station WBTV was unable to confirm that the school system created the question, even though the question was apparently distributed with other system materials.) [WBTV, 11-14-2014]

Summer "comfort food" season is an opportunity for imaginative (and shameless) chefs to take caloric overload to the next level, annually extending themselves to build the sweetest (and, generally, the least heart-friendly) concoctions imaginable. Hence, Deep-Fried Candy Corn (in a base of crescent rolls) made its debut this year, along with the Double Donut burger (two beef patties piled with cheese and bacon between "buns" of glazed donuts (1,996 calories and 53 grams of saturated fat). [Grubstreet.com via Huffington Post, 10-22-2014] [Crawley News (Queensway, England), 11-12-2014]

Cry for Help: Mr. Jenya Bolotov, 26, a Russian, became an Internet sensation in November (on Facebook, YouTube and several news sites) by releasing photographs showing a seven-year obsession with modifying his face to resemble that of a platypus. He has stretched eight parts of his face to effect a duck-billed look, with holes on the sides of his nostrils and plugs extending his lips. "I can eat, talk and speak on the phone like everyone else," he insisted, but is happier now that he can "live differently." (Some Internet commenters complained that, while Bolotov's face is certainly "creepy," they cannot quite conjure up "platypus" from the look.) [Metro.co.uk, 11-18-2014)]

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