ODDLY ENOUGH

ODDLY ENOUGH

UMass students feast on 15,000-pound fruit salad

AMHERST, Mass.

In what’s become an annual tradition, the University of Massachusetts celebrated the start of the new academic year with a delicious, healthy, record-breaking dish.

About 500 students and staff at the Amherst campus last Monday sliced, diced, pitted and peeled 150 varieties of fruit to create a salad weighing more than 15,000 pounds. The salad was mixed in a 15-foot diameter swimming pool.

It included 20 varieties of apples; 19 varieties of melon; peaches; bananas; oranges; berries; and more exotic fruits including quince, passion fruit and rambutan.

A Guinness World Records representative certified the record.

UMass in recent years has started the semester with record-breaking seafood stews and stir fries.

Dog injures Stubbs the cat, honorary mayor in Alaska

ANCHORAGE, Alaska

For the honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, a recent dogfight was less political, more literal.

Mayor Stubbs the cat is recovering at a veterinarian’s office in Wasilla after being injured by a dog recently in the quirky tourist town near Denali National Park.

Owner Lauri Stec tells KTUU that Stubbs suffered a fractured sternum and a punctured lung, and has undergone three hours of surgery. Stec is planning to file a police report. She says the would-be assassin “needs to go away.”

Residents didn’t like the mayoral candidates years ago, so they encouraged enough people to elect Stubbs as a write-in candidate. Although his position is honorary, Stubbs’ popularity is real, earning national stories and visits from tourists. He normally spends his days at a main street general store.

Stork detained as spy found dead

CAIRO

A stork once detained by Egyptian authorities on suspicion of being a winged spy has been found dead.

Mahmoud Hassib, the head of Egypt’s southern protected areas, said Saturday that local residents found the dead bird on an island in the Nile, south of the ancient city of Aswan.

In August, a local resident found the stork in Egypt’s Qena governorate, some 280 miles southeast of Cairo.

Both he and police were suspicious of the European wildlife tracker found on it. Authorities later let the bird go.

However, controversy trails the bird into death. An Egyptian wildlife organization claimed on its Facebook page the bird was “eaten by local villagers.” Hassib denied that the bird had been eaten, though he didn’t know an exact cause of death.

Associated Press