IT MUST BE TRUE…

I read it in the tabloids

An Egyptian academic has won a posthumous Ig Nobel award for his work on the impact on rats of wearing trousers. Dr Ahmed Shafik dressed the rodents in a variety of tiny trousers to examine the effect on their sex drive, and found that the rats who wore polyester slacks displayed less sexual activity than those who wore cotton or wool ones. This, he theorised, was not because females were put off by polyester as a style choice, but because of the electrostatic charges the material created.

Residents of a town in Poland successfully slowed down speeding motorists by erecting a life-size papier mâché doll dressed in a highvis jacket. The alarmingly unrealistic-looking “traffic cop” had a wonky face, an outsize moustache and, instead of a radar gun, an old hairdryer, which is pointed at oncoming traffic. The people of Moscice said it worked a treat: drivers flying towards the town would brake at the sight of the doll. But the real police were not impressed: they said it was a dangerous distraction, and seized it.

A “glamour puss” handbag made out of a dead cat was put up for auction in New Zealand – and sold for £304. Taxidermist Claire Third said she’d found the ginger tom dead on the side of a road, and chose to turn him into a bag because “he had a particularly nice face, and the rest of him was squashed”. The listing described “Tom” – which took 300 hours to make – as a “one-off purse” that will “grab attention wherever you go”. It attracted fierce bidding, but criticism too, with some calling it “disgusting” and “not art”.