Magazine

A car-thief makes off with a car, not realizing there’s an eight-year-old boy sitting inside. A man reports a deer to the police for allegedly harassing his family and, the police are searching high and low for a suspect who escaped from a police station – handcuffed. Find out more in Magazine with Daniela Lazarova.

This year’s World Orienteering Championship hosted by the Czech Republic ended in drama for the man slated to win hands-down. The six-fold world champion in orienteering – France’s Thierry Gueorgiou – was well on his way to a seventh gold medal when –less than a mile from the finish line – he suddenly ran off the course and disappeared from public view. It later transpired that he had been stung by a bee which flew straight into his open mouth. His tongue swelled so badly he could hardly breathe and fearing for his life medics bundled him into a helicopter on stand-by for emergencies and rushed him to the nearest hospital. Gueorgiou soon recovered but the bee deprived him of the coveted seventh gold medal, handing a surprise victory in the men’s relay event to the French archrivals – the United Kingdom. This race is not one that the unhappy French athlete will care to remember but ironically he got his first break in the Czech Republic – at the World Orienteering Championship in Mariánské Lázně in 1991 where he won the spectator race in his age category. As the English-language version of the internet daily Aktualně noted, this time it was just not meant to be(e).

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A forty-three-year old mum from the town of Mokrá Hora near Brno got the shock of her life this week when a car-thief stole her car with her eight-year-old son in it. The thief pretended he needed help and lured her out of the car – then jumped in and drove off. The eight-year-old who was sitting quietly in the back seat made a brave lunge for the wheel but the car was already speeding away. The thief dropped him off a few minutes later and continued on his way. In the meantime, his terrified mum was pursuing them in a car whose driver saw the incident and offered to help her. Both mother and son are uninjured but the police have still not managed to catch the car-thief.

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Photo: Daniel Beránek, Creative Commons 3.0

Strange things happen in the town of Mokrá Hora. This week a fifty-one-year old man living on the outskirts of town reported a deer to the police for allegedly harassing his family over a period of five years. According to the internet daily novinky.cz the police arrived to find the deer in the man’s vegetable garden. Apparently the animal has been a daily visitor and the man decided to report it after it started going into the house and rummaging for food in the kitchen. The deer is not afraid of humans, nor of the family dog and not even the sound of police sirens made it flee. The police have turned to the local hunter’s association for help. Vets say that the deer shows all the signs of having been raised by humans – probably saved after its mother was killed – and then having been let out when it was heavily dependent on them. They say that moving it to a different location would only make it seek a new family – so the only possibility would be to place it in a zoo – unless of course a family can be found which would not mind adopting the deer as a fully-fledged family member.

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Officers in Prague are searching high and low for a suspect who managed to escape from a Prague police station in handcuffs where he was waiting to be questioned. The incident is not only deeply embarrassing but has got a number of officers in hot water with the police inspection team. Now they are hoping to save face by re-capturing the suspect as soon as possible.

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Lubomír Nečas with one of the first mobile phones ever used, photo: CTK

Lubomír Nečas is a doctor whose hobby is collecting phones. He currently has 200 of them, including a telephone booth from the 1950s and a military telephone switchboard. He likes phones with a history and over the past 15 years managed to acquire phones from far away places like China, Lebanon and Brazil. He has a phone which was reportedly used by Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zivkov and a phone used by Czech soldiers in Baghdad. He boasts one of the first mobile phones ever used – it weighs close to two kilos and cost a staggering sum of money in its hey-day. However he says his collection is far from complete –what he’d really like to find is one of the first phones that appeared on the market at the close of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries – unlike today’s plastic phones, the oldest models were made of wood or metal. He also needs more room for his fast-expanding collection. Right now he has a few pieces in his office for patients to admire, many more in his house and the phone booth has pride of place in his garden. Funny, how doctors like to collect things. My dentist has a collection of dental instruments from medieval times – a scary assortment of tongs that look like they belonged to a blacksmith.

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There are lots of culinary events to choose from in the summer time –and if you were so inclined you could spend your holidays going from one to another. This week would have taken you to Štramberk – the town that produces the famous Štramberk ears – for an omelet party on the town’s main square. The chef made an omelet out of 500 eggs and onlookers were asked to help. He certainly broke a number of records – not only in terms of size. He whipped up a meal in 15 minutes for 160 people. The special pan he used was made to order in 1996, it weighs 130 kilos and is two meters wide. From Štramberk you could have gone to the town of Ostrá which held a medieval food bash out in the open. People queued up for roast pork and game, a variety of meat pies, bread rolls with union, sweet raisin cakes and home-made cheese. And, if you still hadn’t had enough, you could have traveled to Miroslav in the south of the country, for a dumpling-eating contest. The dumplings were sweet – filled with apricots, slathered in butter and rolled in sugar. A great summer dish, but I doubt you would have stood a chance against this year’s champion who consumed 75 dumplings in the space of twenty minutes. Well, Czechs have a natural advantage – they’ve been eating dumplings all their lives.