The best tabloid stories of 2017
It must be true...
A famous cocktail garnish was stolen from a bar in Canada. Since the 1970s, visitors to the Downtown Hotel in remote Dawson City have been invited to enjoy a sourtoe cocktail – a shot of whisky with a mummified toe bobbing about in it. The original toe (believed to have come off a frostbitten foot in the 1920s) was swallowed by a punter in 1980. Since then, well-wishers have donated a few replacements; even so, the theft of this particular toe caused considerable anguish. “This was our new toe,” said the manager. “It was a really good one.” He eventually offered a $2,000 reward for its safe return, but soon after, the thief sent the toe back, with a note of apology.
A man in a shark costume was fined for flouting Austria’s burqa ban. The unnamed worker was standing outside the McShark computer shop in Vienna, trying to drum up business, when he was apprehended by police. Under the law, which came into force this year, faces must be visible in public from hairline to chin.
The authorities in China have begun a crackdown on “Chinglish” – the use of comically bad English on public signs. Oft-cited examples include “deformed man toilet” on a sign for a disabled WC, and “racist park” on a sign put up to direct people to the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park during the Beijing Olympics. To avoid future embarrassment, translations for signs are now being scrutinised by a special government body.
Two students who left a pineapple on an empty exhibit stand in an art gallery in Aberdeen were gratified to find, on their return four days later, that it had been upgraded to its own display case. Lloyd Jack and Ruairi Gray said they had left the £1 pineapple at the Look Again show, hoping visitors would mistake it for an exhibit. They were delighted that the show’s curators seemed to have accepted it as art.
A Chinese shopkeeper “tied up and shamed” a thieving rat. Lai Tiancai, who runs a grocery store in Guangdong Province, had caught the rodent feasting on his rice. He strung it up by its limbs and photographed it with a sign around its neck, in which it admitted its guilt. Lai brushed off accusations of cruelty, saying: “It was just a rat.”
A Japanese railway company felt obliged to issue an official apology after one of its trains left the station 20 seconds early. In a statement, the managers of the Tsukuba Express admitted that a morning train to Tokyo had left at 9:44:20, instead of its scheduled departure time of 9:44:40. No passenger had complained about the early departure, which the company blamed on the crew misreading the timetable.
A Colombian woman decided that, rather than let her unfaithful husband get his hands on her life savings, she would eat them. She had stashed $9,000 away, and when her husband found it he demanded half. Determined he wouldn’t get a penny, she proceeded to swallow the cash, which was in the form of 90 $100 bills. Shortly after, she was rushed to hospital suffering from agonising intestinal pain. Surgeons manage to retrieve 57 of the notes; the rest had been destroyed by gastric juices.
Members of a Norwegian far-right group mistook a photograph of six empty bus seats for a group of women wearing burqas. The picture, lifted from the internet, was posted on the Facebook page of Fatherland First as a prank – and the group’s members fell for it. They described the image as “terrifying” and “disgusting”. “This looks really scary,” read one post. “Should be banned. You can’t tell what’s under-neath. Could be a terrorist.”
A woman who ordered a Peppa Pig birthday cake for her daughter was surprised when the bakery handed her one featuring a large picture of a USB stick. “They asked me to bring in the image I wanted on a memory stick, and they would scan it onto the cake,” explained Karen Moroney, from Limerick in Ireland. “So I did. The Peppa Pig picture was the only file on it. But someone got their wires crossed and put a picture of the USB on the cake instead.”
Seven per cent of American adults think that chocolate milk is produced by brown cows, a survey found this summer. That equates to more than 16 million people. However, commentators in the US said they wouldn’t have been surprised if the figure had been higher, given the level of ignorance about food. In the 1990s, a government survey found that one in five adults didn’t know that hamburgers were made from beef.
As part of a team-building exercise at a call centre in Bury, workers who hadn’t achieved their sales targets were made to lie on the ground while a dead squid was dropped on their faces, it was reported. The penalty was chosen by the sales team with the best results – but the centre said that all staff had consented to it.
Staff at a school in East Yorkshire were astonished when a coachload of Zulu dancers turned up at their gates at 8am one morning, and asked: “Is this London?” The troupe, Lions of Zululand, had been due to perform at St Ann’s School for children with learning disabilities in west London – but owing to a satnav mix up, ended up at St Anne’s School in Welton. Having spent more than nine hours getting there, they decided to make the best of it – and put on not one show, but two. “It was fantastic,” said head teacher Lesley Davis.
A group of friends invited a complete stranger to join them on holiday, because he had the same name as a man who’d dropped out. The ten friends had already paid for the all-inclusive mini break in Mallorca when Joe McGrath had to cancel. Rather than see his tickets and hotel room go to waste, they looked for other Joe McGraths on Facebook, and invited them. Joe McGrath, 21, from Manchester was the only one who replied. “I loved every minute of it,” he said later.
