Coat’s Chinese Characters Read “Condensed Milk”

Denys Parsons, Funny Amusing and Funny Amazing (London: Pan Books, 1969), p. 47.

CHINESE PUZZLE

The American woman tourist insisted on buying the material for a coat, and brushed aside the protests of the Chinese salesman. She just loved that authentic Chinese lettering on the material.

But when the woman collected her new coat and put it on, Chinese children kept following her in the street, says Gene Gleason in his book ‘Tales of Hongkong’ (Robert Hale, 25s). And in a restaurant everyone stared at her in amazement. They seemed intrigued by the Chinese lettering, which was across her chest. At last, the woman’s husband asked a waiter to explain the characters. The translation was ‘condensed milk’. -- Weekend

Coded Teddy Bears on Honduran Taxis and Buses

http://fusion.net/story/130557/why-are-hondurans-terrified-of-taxi-drivers-with-teddy-bears/

Fusion

5 May 2015

Why are Hondurans terrified of taxi drivers with teddy bears?

by Tim Rogers

There’s a troubling new trend on the streets of Tegucigalpa these days: taxi drivers with teddy bears.

And no, it’s not some creepy pedophile thing.

According to Honduran social media and newspaper reports, cabbies and bus drivers who have stuffed animals sitting on their dashboard, hanging from their rearview mirror, or tied to their vehicle’s front grille could be signaling gang members.

Though no one seems to have fully decoded the teddy bears’ secrets, it’s rumored that different colored stuffed animals mean the bus driver is or isn’t paying extortion to certain gangs. A stuffed animal displayed through the windshield could be a signal to gangs that the driver isn’t paying extortion at all, but is willing to cooperate with gang members if they stop the vehicle to rob the passengers onboard, according to the social media fretting of Hondurans. […]

The Mounties Always Get Their Booze

James H. Gray, Booze: The Impact of Whisky on the Prairie West (Scarborough, ON: The New American Library of Canada, 1974), p. 28.

In the main the Mounties concentrated on the rum-runners who brought contraband into the Territories from Manitoba, North Dakota, or Montana [in the 1870s and 1880s]. Incoming train passengers were patted for suspicious bulges, and unusually heavy baggage was opened and inspected. The penalty for being caught was loss of the liquor, which was poured down the drain. The largest hauls were made in the over-the-border trade, for across vast stretches of the prairie there was no place to hide when a Mounted Police patrol was attracted by the dust kicked up by a bull train laden with whisky. This happened frequently enough to make a show, statistically, in the tabulated reports of annual seizures. When such seizures were effected, regulations required that the liquor be taken to the nearest post, where it was spilled on the ground under supervision of superior officers.

There are widely believed legends in the west that in most of the Mounted Police posts the spilling was done in a carefully selected spot where earth-covered containers were previously installed to catch the booze. Such was the quality of the liquor sold in the west that nobody seemed overly concerned about drinking stuff that had filtered through a foot of mud and a couple of discarded horse blankets. [14]

14. Eric Wells, unpublished manuscript, Winnipeg, 1967.