Strange stories from around the globe
Bunnies block Budapest highway
BUDAPEST, Hungary - Five thousand bunnies blocked a highway Monday, tying up traffic after the truck that was carrying them collided with another vehicle and overturned.
Neither driver was hurt, authorities said.
The M1 highway — the main road between the capitals of Hungary and Austria — was closed for hours while authorities worked to gather the animals, Highway Patrol Spokeswoman Viktoria Galik said.
Galik said some 500 rabbits were killed.
By midday, 4,400 rabbits had been rounded up.
Japanese toilet maker says bidets may catch fire, offers free repairs
TOKYO - Japan’s leading toilet maker Toto Ltd. is offering free repairs for 180,000 bidet toilets after wiring problems caused several to catch fire, the company said Monday.
The electric bidet accessory of Toto’s Z series caught fire in three separate incidents between March 2006 and March 2007, according to company spokeswoman Emi Tanaka. The bidet sent up smoke in 26 other incidents, the company said.
“Fortunately, nobody was using the toilets when the fire broke out and there were no injuries,” Tanaka said. “The fire would have been just under your buttocks.”
The company will repair 180,000 toilet units manufactured between May 1996 and December 2001 for free, she said. A manufacturing defect is thought to have led to the faulty wiring.
Toto has been a pioneer in high-tech toilets fitted with pressurized water sprayers _ a standard fixture in Japanese homes.
The popular Z series features a pulsating massage spray, a power dryer, built-in-the-bowl deodorizing filter, the “Tornado Wash” flush and a lid that opens and closes automatically. Prices range from $1,680 to $2,600.
The model is not sold overseas.
Mammoth, meteorite or bezoar? Christie’s is offering all 3 in unusual auction
PARIS - For sale: a 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth skeleton.
On Monday, Christie’s auction house in Paris, which usually sells fine art and furniture, is hosting an unusual auction of paleontological curiosities, including several prehistoric mammals.
Skeletons of a 10,000-year-old, 13.5-foot-long rhinoceros and a 7.5-foot-high cave bear are also going under the hammer.
The skeletons are currently owned by a private collector, but buyers may include museums or artists, said Christie’s spokeswoman Capucine Milliot.
The auction is not to all paleontologists’ liking. Pascal Tassy, professor at Paris’ Natural History Museum, has decried the selling off of specimens that could be useful to science.
“It is a pernicious consequence of the Jurassic Park effect,” he said. “In the past, private collectors donated to museums, it was a great time of patronage. Nowadays we make money off anything.”
Bidders interested in buying the star specimen — a Siberian mammoth dubbed “The President” — will need at least $199,000 and a lot of floor space. Tusks and all, it’s 12.5 feet high and 16 feet long.
A 330-pound meteorite containing semiprecious stones and showing rare traces of its entry into the atmosphere is valued at between $122,000 and $162,000. An unhatched dinosaur egg and a wide collection of fossils — some of them 400 million years old — will also be up for auction.
Among the curiosities is a bezoar, a sort of pearl formed in the stomach of some herbivores, made of a stone or hair covered by a layer of calcium phosphate. Bezoars that reach or exceed the size of an egg become tremendously valuable. This one is valued at $34,000.