• LEARNING to drive is undoubtedly a tough old business.
It took us years before we were able to master honking the horn and blowing a kiss to a passing female while masterbating, eating, talking on our mobile phone and downing the remains of our Tennents Super.
But thanks to us giving our ageing instructor Godfrey a ‘special handshake’ we passed the test with flying colours.
So it makes you wonder how a hapless South Korean learner has thus far managed to fail her test 771 times – without even setting foot inside a car.
The 68-year-old gormless grandma has taken and failed the written test repeatedly since April 2005 in the city of Jeonju and repeatedly scored well below the pass mark of 60 per cent.
The woman sells food and household items door to door and currently carries the items in a handcart but thought that she might benefit from a car for her business.
Police estimate she has spent more than £2,000 taking the tests. But Mrs Cha says she will be back for another attempt.
This time she may even get past the first question on the paper, the notoriusly tricky teaser: ‘name:’
• A SORRY Swedish police officer who left her hand gun in a public lavatory was forced to do more than just spend a penny, when she was fined £700.
Inspector Emelie Berglund, 32, from Kalmar, had unstrapped her weapon as she took a break from giving evidence at the city’s district court.
Luckily for her and everyone else in the vicinity of the courtroom, an honest janitor and not a deranged criminal found the gun and returned it to her, only for a colleague to report her to superiors and she was disciplined with the fine.
Her snitching workmate sounds fairly anally retentive, but it’s better than being anally non-retentive – which got Emelie in trouble in the first place. Let’s just hope she completed the necessary paperwork before leaving the cubicle.
• WE have always wondered why anyone would become a sword swallower and how you first find out you are good at it.
But one thing we could guess is that a curved sword is a slightly more tricky adversary than a straight one, and so it proved in China this week as Wang Liang’s first attempt to swallow the curvy weapon ended with a ticklish 1.5cm cut in his oesophagus.
The Dengta City daredevil had performed with a straight sword for eight years, but his successful run ended when he agreed to an audience request for a more eye-catching routine.
“While pushing the sword down, I felt sharp pains in my throat, so I immediately stopped and pulled the sword out,” said worried Wang who faces an uncertain future as his career rests on a knife edge. But we’re sure he’ll sword it all out soon.
• AS CHERYL Cole and her legal team are well aware, we know all about using ladders to enter first floor windows, but even we would be slightly peeved if we were 70-year-old Eugen Dumitrescu, who has been forced by a Romanian judge to enter in this manner – despite being the owner of the flat in question.
The bizarre judgment came about after he fell out with the family living downstairs and was prevented from using the ground floor entrance, which his neighbour owns.
Now, following the ruling, he has to climb 15ft up a ladder to get into the sitting room window of his apartment – but is preparing an appeal, vowing “I will take this to the very top.”
“I cannot go on living like this. Passers-by see me on the ladder and think I’m either a window cleaner and ask me if I can come and clean their windows or I am a burglar and call the police.”
Of course, a window cleaner. Damn it. If we’d used that excuse under interrogation we’d have saved ourselves hundreds of community service hours. Still, we’ll know for next time.
• MODERN art is a pointless pile of wank and studying it is as pointless as telling Aussie blokes why it isn’t appropriate to wear vests to restaurants. But events in Stockholm at least proved students of this baffling bollocks must work for their marks.
Anna Odell stunned doctors by pretending to be mad so she’d be sent to a psychiatric hospital – as part of her degree show.
Odell, 35, convinced police she was psychotic after faking a suicide attempt jumping off a bridge in the Swedish capital.
It took eight staff to restrain her at nearby St Goran’s hospital where the artist kicked, screamed and spat in nurses’ faces until she was sedated and strapped down.
But furious doctors discharged her the next morning when she told them the stunt had been part of an art project for her final degree show at Sweden’s University College of Arts.
Police are investigating complaints of assault, violence against public servants and wasting police time.
Chief physician David Eberhard said: “It’s not only disgraceful that she used our resources, but what she also did to other patients, the staff – to everyone – is shameless. She and the head of her college ought to cut their hair and get real jobs.”
The grade achieved by angry Anna wasn’t reported, but as her work was pointless, annoying and left everyone wondering what the fuck they’d just seen, she should get top marks.
