Husband and wife Francisco and Casilda Figueiredo are among the last exponents
of a traditional Portuguese handicraft -- making ornamental ceramic penises.
For more than three decades, the couple have carefully shaped thousands of ceramic male organs, moulding them into upright shapes and painting them in life-like colours for export to Germany, France and North America.
Francisco and Casilda, aged 68 and 65, still toil away in a humble village workshop in the Caldas da Rainha region, about 100 km (60 miles) north of Lisbon, but say the tradition is dying out.
"The days of the ceramics trade here are numbered, I see no possibility of survival," Francisco said as he prepared moulds of the couple's top-of-the-range two-foot phallic-shaped bottles in his workshop. "It will never be like it was in the past."
The bottle sells for 15 euros (11.8 pounds)
...
The traditional craft has faced a slow decline as buyers in Portugal and beyond become more liberal and the figures lose their ability to provoke.
The couple produce ceramic mugs with a penis sticking out of the bottom or the side, penis-shaped bottles and ceramic soccer figures with the male organ popping out from under a flag.
Francisco said that during the peak of their business they were producing 1,000 bottles a month.
A Japanese civil servant was demoted for viewing
pornographic Web sites more than 780,000 times during office hours over
a nine-month period, an official said Friday.
The man, an employee of the Kinokawa government
in western Japan, visited porn sites from June last year to February
2008, Kinokawa official Tomiko Waki said. The man's name was withheld.
Despite his frequent porn viewing, none of his colleagues noticed his activities.
'Each desk is set apart from each other,' Waki said, adding that the man accessed porn sites 170,000 times in July alone.
The man's superiors discovered his extensive porn site visits after his
computer became infected with a virus, prompting officials to examine
his web browser's history.
A Tunisian court is looking into an unprecedented rape case filed by a
Tunisian family against a man who allegedly "raped" their daughter over
the phone during an erotic call, press reports said on Thursday.
The defendant, 30, denied having ever touched the 20-year-old victim,
but admitted that in one of their phone calls, while they were "totally
into it," he heard her scream and say that a few drops of blood had
come out of her.
Hajji, of Hackney, east London, had concealed a $12,000 engagement ring inside a helium balloon. The idea was that she would pop the balloon as he popped the question.
But as he left the shop, a gust of wind pulled the balloon from his hand and he watched the ring -- and quite possibly the affections of his girlfriend -- sailing away over the rooftops.
The best part of the entire story, though? And why we find out this woman is a raging Cuntilla the Hun?
"But I had to tell her the story -- she went absolutely mad. Now she is refusing to speak to me until I get her a new ring."
People have begun to visit a small rural village in Northern India to worship a baby born with two faces. She was born just two days ago. Word spread quickly among villagers about the newborn baby girl. The baby is seen as an incarnation of God and people make offerings and ask for the baby's blessing.
The contestants have to eat marshmallows that are hanging from the ceiling while a rubber band is wrapped around their head and attached to the wall behind them.
"... Strawberry-flavored Cheetos, which just reached store shelves here in Tokyo. The sub-copy on the front of the package points to a Cheetos stick and says '[covered] in strawberry chocolate.'
What you have here are essentially plain corn puff Cheetos with a sort of strawberry frosting." -- source
Police in South Africa's capital, Pretoria, claim to have to caught the "dumbest criminal" this year.
The man walked into a station to report that he had been held up at gunpoint by a gang who had stolen his mobile phone.
But when the detective phoned the number of the phone reportedly stolen, it rang in the complainant's pocket.
"The shock left him speechless for a few minutes," said police spokesman Eugene Opperman, adding that the man, 25, was then arrested for perjury.
The police issued a statement entitled "Dumbest criminal?" with details of the weekend incident, South Africa's Star newspaper reports.
"At the end of the interview, he rang the complainant's cell phone number, and it rang in the man's pocket," Mr Opperman said, according to the Beeld paper.
"He told the detective that he'd given him the wrong number," he said.
"But couldn't explain why the phone in his pocket had the corresponding serial number, or why it was same make and fitted the description he had given of the 'stolen phone'."
South Africa's reputation has long been tarnished by the high levels of crime, often accompanied by extreme violence involving guns.
NEW DELHI - A wild monkey went on a rampage in a low-income neighborhood in the Indian capital, injuring several people, most of them children, police said Monday.
Police sub-inspector Gaje Singh told The Associated Press that the attacks started late Saturday in the Shastri Park area of New Delhi, adding that it was not immediately possible to give an exact tally of the injured. Local news reports said as many as 25 people were injured.
Singh said officers were patrolling the neighborhood in search of the rogue animal.
"But the monkey hasn't been spotted yet," Singh said.
People in Shastri Park often sleep outside their homes or on open roofs to escape the heat.
Neighborhood resident Naseema, who goes by one name, carried her 1-year-old daughter into her house in attempts to escape the animal. "The monkey followed me in and buried its teeth in my baby's leg," she told the Times of India newspaper.
As New Delhi's forest cover shrinks, rhesus macaque monkeys have overrun its government buildings, temples and residential areas, occasionally biting passers-by or snatching food from them. A government official died last month when he fell from his balcony during an attack by wild monkeys.
Part of the problem is that devout Hindus believe monkeys are manifestations of the god Hanuman and feed them bananas and peanuts, encouraging them to frequent public places.
Last year, the Delhi High Court reprimanded city authorities for not doing enough to stop the animals from terrifying residents.
City authorities have experimented with using langurs -- a larger and fiercer kind of monkey -- to scare or catch the macaques, but the problem persists.
And in case you're Jewish, here's some tips on how to deal with ejaculation, periods, and having sex while she's on the rag. A tip: You're gonna need to start keeping birds.
