FORTEAN FOLLOW-UPS
Strange desires, muddled ethnicities, dead mink rising and womb raider put to death
MAD LOVE [FT394:11]
Amanda Liberty, 34, from Leeds, who is engaged to be married to a chandelier she calls Lumiere, has had a tattoo of her beloved in a demonstration of her commitment. The colourful tattoo on her left arm took one and a half hours. Amanda identifies as objectum sexual, that is, she is attracted to objects rather than people. She first realised her unusual sexual orientation when she fell in love with a drum kit at the age of 14. She later went on to become besotted by New York City’s Statue of Liberty, changing her surname by deed poll to Liberty.
However, her affections later shifted in favour of the lucky chandelier. “When I first saw Lumiere I knew she was the one for me – it was love at first sight,” Amanda explained. “I love Lumiere and want to be with her for the rest of my life.” She was apprehensive about the tattooing process beforehand, on account of the needle, but said it wasn’t too nerve-wracking in the end. “I was so pleased to see the final result, it was incredible. Lumiere also thought it was brilliant, she gave me the energy telling me it was great. She tells me when she doesn’t like things but she really likes the tattoo.”
Amanda first glimpsed her fiancée on eBay. The antique chandelier was made in Germany 91 years ago and is 28in (71cm) wide. Amanda has yet to find a venue for her wedding ceremony. “We don’t have anything booked yet,” she explained. “I have friends all over the world and I want all of them to be there. She has such a beautiful shape, and I feel really amazing energy coming from her.”
Amanda said that: “People just think I’m batty – they don’t take the time to get to know me. The term ‘fruit loop’ has been used numerous times”.
Amanda has over 30 chandeliers, none of whom, apparently, are jealous of each other. “They understand that I love them all for all of their different personalities,” she explained. “For example, I love kissing and cuddling Lumiere, but I sleep with Jewel, another chandelier, every night, as she is portable and very nice to cuddle.”
She also intends to travel to New York to see her former partner ‘Libby’, aka the Statue of Liberty, and said they are still firm friends. For more obscure objects of desire, see FT240:22-23, 357:8-9, 388:6. mirror.co.uk, 23 Nov 2020.
CHANGING PLACES [FT398:24-25]
Hilaria Baldwin, yoga teacher, ‘influencer’ and wife of actor Alec Baldwin, has announced that her real name is Hillary and that she was born in Boston rather than Majorca. The 36-year-old posted a video on Instagram in which she stated: “Yes, I am a white girl.” Her post was in response to recent allegations that she has spent years misrepresenting her heritage and claiming to be Spanish, even to the extent of faking a Spanish accent. A number of videos of her past TV appearances were unearthed as evidence to this effect, and several former classmates came forward to confirm that Hilaria was in fact raised in Boston, Massachusetts. “I went to high school with her,” said one. “Genuinely lovely person, I recall, but fully a white girl from Cambridge.” Another added: “I went to high school with her. She was perfectly nice and serious about ballroom dancing. Her name was indeed Hillary Hayward-Thomas and she did not have her current accent.”
Internet sleuths uncovered details about Hilaria’s parents, Dr Kathryn Hayward and David Thomas. Both were university professors in the USA before their retirement to Majorca in 2011. Hilaria has long described her mother as Spanish, but records indicate that Dr Hayward is actually a fourth-generation Massachusetts resident, while
her father’s family has even deeper US roots, having lived here since before the American Revolution.
Hilaria is listed as an alumnus of the Cambridge School of Weston in Weston, Massachusetts, notwithstanding her repeated claims to have moved to New York from Spain in 2003 to attend New York University. Her online biography on her agency’s website states she was born on Majorca and raised in Boston, without specifying a timeline.
However, following the recent social media furore, she has now clarified that she only spent “some of” her childhood in Spain and “some” of it in Massachusetts, where she was born. She explained that Hilaria is the name she would use in Spain, while Hillary would be used in the US. “Let’s be very clear that Europe has a lot of white people in there and my family is white,” she said. “Ethnically, I am a mix of many, many, many things. Culturally, I grew up with two cultures so it’s really as simple as that.” D.Mail, 27 Dec 2020.
Design technology teacher Jason Wardill is puzzled that his trade union, the National Education Union (NEU) refers to him as a black man. Mr Wardill, 42, was surprised to be invited by the NEU to a meeting of black teachers last year, as he is of Mediterranean and Jewish heritage. Ever since then he has been trying to stop his union referring incorrectly to his ethnicity, but with no success.
An NEU spokesperson stated that they treated ‘black’ as a political term, rather than denoting a person of African heritage. Therefore, the term includes “all members who selfidentify as black, Asian and any other minority ethnic groups who do not identify themselves as white.”
When Mr Wardill registered to join the union and was asked for his ethnicity, he ticked ‘mixed other’ because, he says, it was “the only option available for me.” He explained that although ‘Jewish’ could be ticked for religion, it wasn’t an option for ethnicity, “which leads me to believe the NEU doesn’t recognise Jewish as a race. They only appear to recognise it as a religion,” he told a newspaper. When he contacted the union to explain he was not black, they informed him that since he did not consider himself white, he had to be registered as black.
“They said they could put an asterisk next to black to show it was political. I said that shouldn’t make a difference, because I am not black. It made me feel pretty helpless,” he admitted. “BAME [Black, Asian and minority ethnic] would be absolutely fine, as it encompasses everything.” He says he feels the NEU’s actions are “discriminatory” against other ethnicities and religions. “I don’t feel that a black member would necessarily want me down as a black member, and rightly so.” D.Mail, 27 Dec 2020.
ZOMBIE MINK RISE FROM GRAVE [FT400:8]
Along with the Netherlands, Spain and the state of Utah, the Danish government decided to cull over 10 million mink after fears that the animals kept in fur farms were vectors of a new strain of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) which, it was feared, could be resistant to the new vaccine. The dead animals were swiftly interred in mass burial pits. Unfortunately, thousands of the minks’ bloated carcases have since begun to rise from their shallow graves.
The phenomenon was first noticed at a burial site located in a military training field last November. “It is an extraordinary situation,” said a national police spokesman (police were responsible for the mink culling action). “In connection with the decay, gasses form, which cause the whole thing to expand a little, and then in the worst case they get pushed out of the ground.”
A statement from Denmark’s environment ministry described the dead mink rising from their graves as a “temporary problem”. Naturally, the post-death re-emergence of the furry creatures triggered an outbreak of zombie comparisons on Danish social media. “2020, the year of the zombie mutant killer minks,” read one tweet. D.Telegraph, 26 Nov 2020.
WOMB RAIDER EXECUTED [FT231:25]
Lisa Montgomery, the only female inmate on federal death row in the US, has been executed by lethal injection at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was convicted of murder in 2007, having killed a pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, before cutting out and kidnapping her baby in Missouri in 2004. She had befriended the 23-year-old woman online over a shared love of dogs, then drove to her house, overpowered her, strangled her with a piece of rope, and cut the baby out of her womb. Police discovered Montgomery cradling a new-born baby girl she claimed to have given birth to the day before. Her victim bled to death but the baby was safely recovered and returned to her grieving family.
Montgomery is the first female federal inmate to be put to death by the US government in 67 years, and is one of several condemned prisoners to be executed in the last few days of Donald Trump’s presidency. BBC News, 16 Jan 2021.
For our most recent roundup of womb raider cases, see
FT384:22-23.