Al Jazeera
4 February 2019
Portuguese shopkeepers using
ceramic frogs to 'scare away' Roma
Porto, Portugal - Surrounded by baskets of oranges and
tangerines, a bright green ceramic frog stands at the entrance of Helena
Conceicao's grocery shop. "Everybody has frogs here," she said.
"It's to scare away Gypsies because they are afraid of frogs." Similar
ornaments have been placed at the entrance of shops, cafes and restaurants all
over Portugal. […]
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WDBJ-TV [Roanoke, VA]
4 February 2019
Roanoke leaders say there's
no truth to rumors of poisoned dog treats in parks
[…] The social media post claimed a Game Warden
approached a man and warned him that people placed poisoned treats along
greenways. It continued to claim the Game Warden did a sweep of Green Hill Park
recently and found over 70 poisoned dog treats. […]
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The Advocate [Baton Rouge, LA]
3 February 2019
Smiley: Most memorable
funeral ever
Frances Pickering Billeaud says, "My dad, Jack
Pickering, was with Desi Arnaz’s band (before the 'I Love Lucy' show), and the
band was on tour a good part of many years. They played a Chicago theater many
times and grew fond of a Catholic priest, Father Pat, who loved show people. One
night, Father Pat came in on crutches with a large cast on one leg. He had
officiated at the funeral of a young soldier killed in World War II. The
soldier was from a very large Chicago Italian family, all of whom attended the
military funeral. The emotion of it all was finally too much for the
great-grandma, and she fainted, falling to the ground as the rifles fired the
salute. When a 7-year-old boy shouted, 'Oh no. They shot grandma,' Father Pat,
holding his prayer book to his face, could not control his laughter, and as he
tried to do so, took a step forward and fell into the open grave, breaking his
leg. Needless to say, it was a funeral nobody present would ever forget."
[This is a variant of a well-known joke/contemporary
legend. The detail of the broken leg – a motif found in some other contemporary
legends – is new to me here.]
Freeburg Tribune (IL), 2 Feb 1951, p. 10.
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John Kinsman, AIDS
Policy in Uganda: Evidence, Ideology, and the Making of an African Success
Story (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 84.
The advent of Uganda’s quiet condom promotion policy in
1991 marked a substantial change in the country’s overall strategy to control
HIV. Condoms were then still only available via family planning clinics and
some pharmacies. […]
[T]here was a great deal of opposition to the condom
in Uganda at the time, with many people associating their use with promiscuity
and prostitution. Furthermore, one of my respondents – a man from rural Masaka
– added that, “at first, people didn’t want to use condoms. They had this
belief that the bazungu [*] are very
clever. They want Africans to die, so they put the virus inside the condom. And
if you use it, you will get the virus, because of that oil they put on the
condom. They ask, have you ever heard of these Europeans who die from AIDS?
They don’t die of AIDS. We Africans are the only people who die of AIDS.”
* Mzungu is
Swahili for “white person,” and is widely used in Uganda. Bazungu is the plural.
