BBC Reporter Mobbed By Lemurs

In our contining effort to distract you from the ills of the world, here's a BBC reporter struggling with lemurs.

You're welcome.

What If A Woman Had Been That Expert Interrupted By The Kids On BBC

A scene from a parody of that famous Korean expert BBC
interview with interrupting kids if a woman had been the expert
Here, she defuses a bomb. 

Much  has been made of that expert on Korean politics who was interrupted by his kids while giving a policy interview with the BBC a few weeks back.

The kids came in during the Skype interview and the expert's wife frantically came in and scooted the kids out of the room while the BBC interview continued.

The viral video was funny, in that both the BBC reporter and the Korea expert unflappably continued the interview.

A nearly-as-viral video has surfaced that imagines how things would have worked out had the expert on Korean been a woman and how she would have managed various interruptions.

In the parody, the woman calmly explains the Korean political crisis to a BBC reporter while attending to the kids, cooking a turkey, cleaning a toilet, even defusing a bomb.

I think some busy women, and the men in their lives might relate:

Why You REALLY Shouldn't Get In A Car Wreck In India

Piyush Tewari is trying to change the culture of India
that discourages people from helping accident victims. 

Almost always, if people see a nasty car wreck, people run to help. Somebody calls 911, people run over to comfort or give first aid to the injured, others direct traffic away from the crash so it doesn't get even worse.

In India, if you get in car wreck, you're really screwed. Because nobody will help you.   

The system there turns people into indifferent jerks, says a recent article in the BBC.

Everything's stacked against you if you try to help an accident victim in India.

It arriving police see you rendering aid, they'll assume you're doing it out of guilt and charge you with causing the crash and you'll face criminal charges. Basically, you're a criminal for being a nice person.

It takes forever for ambulances to arrive at accident scenes in India, so it makes more sense to drive the victims to the hospital yourself. But if you do, the hospital will relentlessly hit you up for the victim's medical bills.

Even if you avoid criminal charges and hospital bills, you might be a witness in court proceedings involving the accident case.

Trials take forever to go forward, so you're stuck in limbo. You miss going to work, running your life.

BBC says there is a safety campaigner named Piyush Tewari whose cousin was once hit by a car and nobody helped.

He managed the Indian Supreme Court to issue guidelines that allow people to call emergency services and remain anonymous, provide them with immunity from criminal liability and forbidding hospitals from demanding payment from bystanders who take people to the hospitals.

Now he's working to get all jurisdictions in India to adopt these guidelines, and enshrine them in a Good Samaritan law. (Such laws are widespread in the United States.)

Let's hope Tewari's efforts work, because a lot of people are dying needlessly in India due to their system.

And thank goodness we in the U.S. live in a country in which, almost always, people run to help eery time they see a crash.

Woman Crashes Her Own Funeral; Husband Ordered Her Death Not Pleased

Balenga Kalala and Noela Rukundo on their wedding day.
Kalala later plotted to kill his wife. Read on to
see how it went. 

One day last year, Noela Rukundo of Melbourne, Australia departed for Burundi, Africa to attend the funeral of her stepmother, who she loved dearly.

After the funeral, she was in her hotel room when her husband, Balenga Kalala called. Kalala told his wife she must have had a trying day with the funeral, and the African heat that was surely stifling her hotel room.

He suggested she go outside for a breath of fresh air. Rukundo, assuming her husband was being kind and loving, took him up on her suggestion.

Thus begins an incredible yard as told by the BBC about a woman who gets a terrible surprise, and a husband that gets an even bigger surprise. A very karmic one.

When Rukundo got outside the hotel, she was confronted by a man pointing a gun at her. He kidnapped Rokundo  by stuffing her into a car and driving away.

After more than a half hour of driving the car stopped. She was led into a room and tied to a chair.

"One of the kidnappers told his friend, 'Go call the boss.' I can hear doors open but I didn't know if their boss was in a room or if he came from outside," Rokundo told the BBC. 

The kidnappers asked Rokundo "What did you do to this man,' referring to a man that ordered Rokundo's kidnapping and impending murder.   Then the gang's leader called the person who had ordered the gang to kill Rokundo.

The man who answered was Rokundo's husband. He had ordered the murder. Her husband's voice on the other end of the phone said, "Kill her."

Rokundo had met her husband in Australia. He was a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from which he fled after rebels killed his wife and young son.

Rokundo and Kalala fell in love. She had five children from a previous relationship. The pair had three more. "I give him, beautiful and handsome, two boys and one girl. So I don't know why he choose to kill me."

It turns out the killers had some scruples, though. They made it a rule not to kill women and children. The gang extorted more money from Kalala, saying the price of the murder was up by 3,400 Australian dollars.

The gang told Rokundo to leave Burundi right away, because if her husband found out she was alive, he'd hire another gang to kill her.

The gang gave Rokundo a memory card containing recorded phone conversations between them and Kalala discussing the murder and receipts for Western Union money transfers

Says the BBC:

"''We just want you to go back to tell other stupid women like you what happened,' the gang told Noela as they parted. 'You must learn something: you people get a chance to go overseas for a better life. But the money you are earning, the money the government give to you, you use it for killing each other!'"

By the time Rukundo returned to Australia, Kalala had told everyone his wife had died in a tragic accident while in Burundi.

As the last of a group of mourners left their house, Rukundo showed up.

"I just stood looking at him. He was scared, he didn't believe it. Then he starts walking towards me, slowly, like he was walking on broken glass. 

"When I get out of the car, he saw me straight away. He put his hands on his head and said, 'Is it my eyes? Is it a ghost?'"

 Kalala then screamed "I'm sorry for everything!!"

Too late.

A few days later, Australian police told Rukundo to call Kalala, who offered a full confession to her over the phone. Police were recording it.

Kalala was sentenced to nine years in prison.

He offered a couple of vague motives. Maybe Rukundo was seeing another man. (she wasn't)

Alternatively, "sometimes the devil can come into someone to do something but after they do it, they start thinking, 'Why I did that thing.'"

Why indeed.

The worst part of this story is the Melbourne African community is largely ostracizing Rukundo. In some socieites, especially religious or conservative ones, it's always the woman's fault, apparently.

Still she's alive, and her now ex husband is in  jail.

Use this story as a cautionary tale in the unlikely event you ever want to "get rid" of a spouse

It's you that might be gotten rid of.

Adele Enters An Adele Impersonation Contest

Adele impersonators, including a disguised real Adele
acting as "Jenny" (far right) await their turn backstage. 

Adele is dominating the music news of late, with the release of her not surprisingly beautiful new album "25"

When an artist becomes as big as Adele, there's a lot of fan clubs, look-alikes, wanna-bes and just general excitement around her.

So it was in Britain, where the BBC filmed a small local Adele impersonation contest.

With the help of prosethics, makeup and acting, Adele showed up at the contest as "Jenny" a mild mannered nanny trying her luck at singing like Adele.

Nervous "Jenny" is the last contestant to perform and sings "Make You Feel My Love." Only then does it dawn on the other contestants who "Jenny" really is. And they flip out, naturally.

The resulting video is really funny and sweet. Take a look. Totally worth your time:

Always Listen To Your Dog: Pooch Saves Couple From Landslide

A coastal landslide blocked this road in Cornwall, England.  

Two friends in Cornwall, England learned the other day it's always a good idea to follow your dog's lead.

According to the BBC, Amy Jones and Matt Smith recently sat on a bench, up on the cliffs above Great Western Beach in Newquay, Cornwall enjoying the gorgeous view.

Hazel, their collie was with them. Hazel suddenly started sniffing around suspiciously, then bolted away, afraid of something.

This dog, sensing danger, dashed off before the landslide,
prompting people to run after her and get away before
the landslide could endanger them.  

Jones and Smith chased after Hazel, not wanting her to get hurt running off like that. But then the cliff they had been on collapsed.

The landslide sent 100 tons of debris onto the access road below.  Had Hazel not run off, the two people would have been caught and possibly killed in the landslide.

"She definitely knew something was happening," Smith said.

Nobody was hurt in the landslide, but it will take a long time to clear the access road, and nobody can really get to the park or the beach until things are cleaned up.

But thanks to Hazel, workers will just be removing rocks, dirt and broken trees, not dead bodies.

A Love Story: Phone Company Deletes Cherished Voicemail, But Technicians Get It Back.

Stan Beaton reacts when hearing his late wife's voice again.
A voice mail recording she made before her death was
deleted, but technicians eventually recovered it.  

Stan Beaton's wife died in 2003.

It comforted him a little that he kept his wife's voice on the home voice mail.

But recently, technical work by his telecom firm, Virgin Media, deleted the voice mail, and it was thought that it was permanetly deleted.

Beaton, 68, of Mirfield, West Yorkshire, England, was devastated by the loss of that snippet of his wife's voice, the BBC reports. He was initially told the voice was "lost forever."

"I've always resisted changing companies because whenever I mentioned that my wife's voice was our voicemail message and would it be retained and each company said no, so that's why I never changed.

Sadly, it disappeared. I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry......I just could not tell people how it affected me at that time. It really did devastate me."

But technicians at Virgin Media began to poke and prod and do all that alchemy with computer systems that tech geeks do, and got the voice mail with Beaton's wife back.

Given how a lot of big telecom companies aren't exactly awesome at customer service these days, you have to appreciate Virgin Media's efforts.  After all, the chances of getting that voice mail back were slim.

Here's what Rob Evans, executive director of engineering at Virgin Media said:

"It was like searching for a needle in a haystack, however, a team of 11 engineers spent three days tracking it down."

Here's a nice video of Beaton with the newly recovered voice mail message. What his late wife says is as mundane as possible, but given the importance to Beaton, also incredibly profound.


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Another Sign Animals Are Smarter Than We Are: Watch This Crow

When I was very little, my father captured a crow and we kept it for a pet for awhile.

This crow, named "007" had a complex
puzzle to figure out. Did he?  

Darn thing was the smartest thing. It could figure out anything.

So I wasn't surprised when I saw the clip, which you'll see below of a BBC show called "Inside the Animal Mind."

They gave a crow, named 007, a very complex task. It included eight steps he had to figure out in order to obtain some food as a reward.

I've probably already given you the spoiler, but watch what happens. It's really cool: