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A scandal of epic proportions
As incriminating goes, the texts found on several sumo wrestlers’ phones last week couldn’t get much worse. “Would you let me win at the next tournament? If not, I want the 200,000 back,” said one, from high-ranking amateur Kiyoseumi to Kasuganishiki. “Who do I owe a win now?” said another. Allegations of match-fixing and payoffs to yakuza members have sent Japan’s venerable sport into a tailspin. More than 60 wrestlers have copped to illegal sports betting, with three arrested. And a Japanese firm has pulled an ad starring champion Hakuho, who isn’t even implicated. “We wanted to emphasize the robustness of our ‘big frame’ wooden pillars,” Sumitomo Forestry Co. said. They will instead use actors dressed as those paragons of virtue: American football players.
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Baby Vicky’s incredible journey
She’s better travelled than most one-year-olds, having strayed some 4,000 miles east from her native Newfoundland—”all of it in the wrong direction,” says the Seal Rescue Centre in Germany, where she ended up. The lonely hooded seal is now the focus of a fundraising effort. Flying her home would run $16,000, but Vicky is homesick, and, according to the centre, “perhaps the most bad-tempered seal we have ever had!”
A cowboy’s last ride
James Fogle, whose novel Drugstore Cowboy chronicled the tribulations of a gang of addicts who rob drugstores to feed their habits, is back in jail and facing what could amount to a life sentence for holding up a Redmond, Wash., pharmacy with a BB gun. Made into a critically acclaimed film in 1989 by the director Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy mixed equal parts grit and pathos, but the 74-year-old’s life since has been characterized more by bathos: in 2004, he cut a hole into the roof of a Seattle-area pharmacy and climbed down by rope. Police later found him asleep on the floor with bags full of drugs.
So a Mexican approaches the bar…
A Mexican jewellery design student in London, Iris de la Torre, is threatening a claim against Top Gear after her countrymen were branded “lazy, feckless and flatulent” on the hit BBC car show. It could be a test case for a new law that bans racial harassment by anyone providing a “service to the public.” The BBC shrugged off the comments, saying, “Our comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics… [and] the French being arrogant and the Germans being over-organized.” And Jeremy Clarkson and co-hosts haven’t changed their style. This week, Top Gear did a whole segment on the vehicle-theft tendencies of Albanians. Perhaps the idea of paying $1.6 million in damages to De la Torre will persuade them.
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Against all odds
Two holes in one, in a nine-hole round of golf? It happens, but the odds are 67 million to one—a number that came up for an amateur, Adam Smith, at Stonehaven Golf Club on Scotland’s rugged North Sea coast. Smith aced the 163-yard starting hole—then, on the seventh, sank another one-swing hole at 132 yards. Things might well have gone even better, but Smith could reportedly only play nine holes due to conflicting plans (which likely included getting out of those seaside Scottish winds in February).
Where angels fear to tread
Many might wonder if those connected to Fool’s Gold, the almost universally panned 2008 rom com starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, might prefer to disown it (presumably, they’d keep the $300 million the ?lm grossed worldwide). Not Lou Boudreau, the Chester, N.S., novelist who claims Warner Bros. stole his book Fandango’s Gold as the basis for the film. He has filed a copyright infringement suit in Halifax—a 38-page document in which he lays out the similarities between his book and the film in a series of tables. He has 60 days to follow up by serving the studio in California.
Old is gold
Audiences at New York Fashion Week will be treated to an unusual sight next week: catwalks dotted with a who’s who of models from yesteryear—including Carol Alt, 51, and Carmen Dell’Orefice, who is 79—an age we weren’t sure existed in the style world. Golden girls are something of a trend, with Elle Macpherson and 53-year-old Inès de la Fressange modelling for Louis Vuitton and Chanel. But Adrienne Vittadini takes the prize for her show featuring the near-octogenarian model.
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