Kitty's Corner

You guys should know it by now - I'm just not interested in watching sports on TV. But sometimes there's a match that's big enough to make me take notice, and I watch it anyway.

Take handball for instance. It's quite a big sport in Denmark, and yes, I was aware that there was the European Championship going on - it was hard to miss since everybody was talking about it. I didn't bother to see any of the games, even though I heard that Denmark kept winning.

We won over Spain in the semi-finals on Friday, and that was the same day that Serbia won over Macedonia. It was also the day where unsportsmanlike Serbian fans threw a dart from the stands aimed at Macedonian player Ivano Balic. It happened to hit one of their own players in the eye instead: Zarko Sesum. I can't tell you how disgusted and appalled I am by behaviour like that. Talk about raging idiots!!! A player might lose his eye because you bloody stupid morons can't behave!



But anyway - the two wins meant that Denmark played against Serbia in the final on Sunday. I was invited to a 3 day conference, so I thought I'd keep myself updated via my smartphone. But no - big TV screens were set up in the conference centre, and the conference action itself was rescheduled so that the attendees could watch the match first (I told you it's a popular sport in Denmark), and so I watched the game with 450 other people.

And it was a big game - man it was big!!

To make a long story shorter: after a tough, hard game, we beat Serbia! 21 to 19! <punches fist into the air> And Denmark is now Europe's best handball team. We are the Champions!!



Fuck, that feels good, even for a non sports fan like myself.

The Danish meat giant "Danish Crown" has now banned Nutella. That means that the staff can't bring Nutella sandwiches for breakfast, or nut paté sandwiches for all that matters. They can't even add nuts to their salads if they want to. Similarly, the canteen has stopped selling chocolate with nuts.

The banning of Nutella and nuts in general is not because the company cares about the employees' health. No, it's all about the customers.

The big British supermarket chain Tesco, which each year buys tons of meat from the Danish Crown, has required that the nuts must go.

Tesco fears that a nut in one way or another ends up in the meat, and that the "nut contaminated" meat unfortunately get sold to a British person with allergies - with lawsuits to follow.

The employees have accepted the ban.

Thank god I don't work there!!

Travelling. I just love it. It's nice to get away from everyday life for a little while and experience new things! For long trips I prefer going by plane. It's fast and effective and often it's cheaper than going by train.

But beware if you want to stay on board!

There are plenty of ways to get yourself kicked out of a plane. And easy ways too. Here's a few of them:

Too political :

Lorrie Heasley from Washington was asked to either turn her t-shirt inside out or to leave the Southwest-plane back in 2005.

On her t-shirt was pictured then President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.

Underneath the pictures was a reference to the movie "Meet the Fockers", just spelled a bit different.

She chose to leave the plane.


Too smelly :

In February 2010 a man was asked to leave an Air Canada Jazz-plane.

He smelled so bad that the other passengers all stared at him and held their breaths. A passenger described the man's body odour as "brutal".

The man was allowed on a plane the day after. The story doesn't say if he used the extra day up taking a long shower...


Too heavy / too normal :

Film director Kevin Smith, was thrown off a Southwest Airlines plane for being too fat in February 2010. Smith was already seated on the Oakland to Burbank flight when an attendant told him he posed a "safety risk".

Southwest later offered its "heartfelt apologies" to him.

Same year, same company, a normal sized passenger was asked to disembark so an obese passenger could have a second seat.

Southwest later explained: "The passenger in question was a minor who was traveling alone. Normally, if the passenger were an adult, she would be required to purchase an extra ticket, but we did not want to leave the 14-year-old stranded.


Too different :

The passengers on an Atlantic Southeast plane felt uncomfortable. That's the explanation the company gave for asking two Muslim men to leave the plane. The two men were religious leaders and were wearing a traditional Muslim robe.

They were on their way to North Carolina to participate in a conference about Islamophobia....
(The Irony button gets an extra workout on that one!)

Too cuddly :

A woman aboard a Milan to Rome flight refused to fly without her cuddly toy crocodile by her side.

Attendants aboard the 2007 Ryanair flight asked the woman to move the meter-long toy, which was blocking the emergency exit. When she refused to stow it correctly, they asked her to leave the plane.

I don't know if you remember my post about how Danish senior citizens who need help with personal hygiene may be washed in some sort of a "car wash" device in the near future? If you don't remember that, you can read it here.

The latest thing I've heard about is that babies now also get to be in touch with robots. The department of IT and innovation in Skanderborg Municipality has invented a "cradle robot". The robot gently rocks the children's cradles back and forth in order to make them fall asleep.

The intention is to give the nursery teachers more time to attend to other services. Instead of spending half an hour rocking the children's cradles, they can spend the time looking after other children (who presumably are awake).

I don't know what to think about this trend. When they said that we'd all have our own robot sometime in the future, I kind of imagined something else, you know? Something useful - like "Do the laundry", "Pay my bills", "Bake me a Cake" or even "Air the apartment while I'm at work". Not for stuff that requires the human touch.

I wonder what'll be next?

A Moscow chef killed his father-in-law and then allegedly served him up to customers at his restaurant!

According to police, the 54-year-old chef worked at an establishment well-known for its chebureki, which are large meat-filled pastries, that could easily disguise the odd hunk of flesh or human limb. The human meat was allegedly on sale for three days in a cafe just two miles from the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia.

The chef reportedly killed his 82-year-old father-in-law during a drunken brawl. But police are refusing to either confirm or deny a claim by tabloid newspaper 'Life News' that the chef then ran the dead man's body through a meat grinder, used the resulting product to fill his chebureki, then served the pastries to customers for three days before being caught and sent to a psychiatric institution.

The alleged incident is the latest in a number of cannibal cases to have hit Russia in the past two years :

In May an unemployed man killed his drinking partner and butchered his body in his Moscow flat.

In the western city of St Petersburg in 2009, two cannibals killed a 16-year-old girl, cut her up and ate parts of her body.

The young men explained at their trial that they were 'very hungry'. They were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 18 and 19 years.

Also in 2009, Sergey Gavrilov was jailed for killing and eating parts of his mother.

But the 27-year-old was given a lenient prison sentence because the judge said he was 'starving' and needed to eat after spending all his money on vodka and gambling.

And in August another chef admitted to killing a man and then making sausages and meatballs from the corpse. Ivan L, as he has been named, was so proud of his culinary achievements, including rib dishes, that he posted short video clips on the Internet.

The 21-year-old confessed to police in the Russian city of Murmansk saying that he had a strong desire to eat human flesh. He had used a gay dating website to lure his victim, aged 32, to his flat where he brutally knifed him to death before cutting off his head and feet.

Cannibals who kill and eat their victims in Russia normally receive 15 years in jail for their crimes. Normally?

I'd say that Fava bean and Chianti sales must be doing especially well in Russia. And incidentally, WTF?