SIDELINES...

LOVE BOMB

A German bomb squad called to investigate a suspected hand grenade in a Bavarian forest found that the object was a rubber sex toy. A jogger found a bag containing the device in a forest outside Passau and alerted the police, who determined it was a rubber grenade replica; condoms and lubricant in the bag helped point to the device’s intended use. “An Internet search confirmed the suspicion,” said a police spokesman. Guardian, 27 April 2021.

BIRTHDAY WONDER

On 8 April 2021 French footballer Antoine Griezmann celebrated the birth of his third child with his partner Erika Choperina, a girl named Alba, beating the odds of 133,000-1 as she was born on the same date as Griezmann’s other two children. His elder daughter Mia arrived on the 8 April 2016 and his son Amaro on the same day in 2019. Sun, 9 April 2021.

GAIA SURVIVAL STRATEGY

Human sperm counts in the West plummeted by 59% between 1973 and 2011, leading to drastic birth rate reduction. Since the planet’s crises are largely caused by human over-population (choked by plastic, mass extinctions etc), maybe Gaia is gearing up to cull Homo sapiens. Guardian, 27 Feb 2021.

COPPER LOAD OF THIS

Commodities trader firm Mercuria Energy Group arranged to buy 10,000 tonnes of copper blister, an impure form of the metal, for $36m. About 6,000 tonnes was loaded for delivery to China, but before setting sail from a port near Istanbul, the copper was found to have been switched with paving stones spray-painted to resemble the semi-refined metal. Bietsan Bakir, the Turkish firm which sold Mercuria the copper, has not responded to requests for comment. BBC News, 10 Mar 2021.

TALENTED HOUND

Joshua Ponsford, 23, from Bristol, was prosecuted by the RSPCA and banned from keeping pets for five years after “verbally abusing” Lulu, his Rottweiler – seeming to imply the RSPCA thinks the pet understood English. D.Telegraph, 16 Nov 2020.