A fruit picker finds a fairy, and more

last updated 8 January 2015

A fruit picker finds a fairy

A Mexican man has captured what he says is a real-life fairy and preserved it in formaldehyde. Jose Maldonado, 22, says he was picking guavas when he saw something he initially thought was a firefly. When he caught it, he saw an inch-long, red-and-yellow humanoid creature, and “I knew that it was a fairy godmother.” He hasn’t explained why it died. Hundreds of local peasants have lined up to pay Maldonado to see the preserved fairy in a glass bottle, even though skeptics say it looks like a plastic toy.

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A Chinese classical pianist caused a sensation when she walked onstage to play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic recently in a skintight, short orange dress and stiletto sandals. Rising star Yuja Wang, 24, performed Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with “delicacy, speed, and grace,” said music critic Mark Swed, but her dress “was so short and tight that had there been any less of it,” the Hollywood Bowl might have denied admission “to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult.”

An elderly man mixes up the boxes

An elderly British man with poor vision has been dropping his mail for two years into a box on the street set up to collect dog poop. Alf Spence, 91, was alerted to his mistake by a helpful passerby, who informed him that the box he’d just placed a postcard into was not a mailbox but a designated receptacle for dog feces. “I’ve not got the best eyesight these days,” says Spence, who has since complained to British postal authorities, whom he had accused of losing two years’ worth of his outgoing mail.