In a story worthy of Shakespeare, or at least a daytime soap opera, a Vietnamese woman working as a maid for an elderly Taiwanese man discovered that her employer was in fact her long-lost father. Tran Thi Kham, 40, was the product of a 1967 affair between her father, Tsai Han-chao, and a Vietnamese girl working as a shop assistant in a department store.

Tsai returned to Vietnam, unaware that he had left the girl pregnant; Tran's mother died shortly after her birth, and the girl was given only the paltriest amount of information about her birth father: a photograph and a ring. Decades later, Tran came to work for the Tsai family as a caretaker for Mrs. Tran. After seven months of employment, she moved on, but left behind the package containing the photograph and the ring, which were discovered by a stunned Tsai.

Police in Conyers, Georgia, may soon be ticketing cars in a holiday spree. But don't worry -- these are good tickets. The yellow slips of paper will be placed on windshields and in windows to remind drivers that visible gift packages may attract thieves.

Conyers Police Chief David Cathcart explains the program:

"If you leave packages in clear view in your car, then you might be providing an opportunity to a thief that can be avoided if you are just a little more carefull. Even if you put your packages in the car and think you're only going to be in another store for a few minutes, you're still at risk because it only takes a moment for someone to take advantage of a situation."

Programs like this rarely get publicity, either because good news doesn't sell or because they're well-intentioned but ridiculous. In this case, the yellow tickets seem nice enough, but wouldn't they just serve as flags for thieves looking for cars with unprotected packages? Do you think this is a good idea or silly?

A family on the Upper West Side of New York has placed an ad in New York magazine pleading for $1 million to buy an apartment so they can stay in their wealthy neighborhood. Gawker spotted the ad and posted it here; it reads:

"WE NEED HELP BUYING AN APARTMENT on the UWS, 3bd 2 bath. YOU are a philanthropic, wealthy person who would not miss a million bucks and would be interested in donating (or even investing) in a highly targeted manner: to my family. WE are a wonderful, hard working middle class family who contributes to our UWS community, is entrenched, happy and desperately wants to remain on the UWS (lest the city lose yet another wonderful family to the burbs). We can afford 600-700K, so you see the predicament. Can you help us??"

A British couple wanted to move to New Zealand after their wedding. They ran into one small problem, or actually it was one large problem. New Zealand told them they are too fat to immigrate to their country.

Robyn Toomath, a spokesman for New Zealand's Fight the Obesity Epidemic, said, "The immigration department can't afford to import people who are going to be a significant drain on our health resources ... You can see the logic in assessing if there is a significant health cost associated with this individual and that would be a reason for them not coming in."

No, I can't see that logic. Because under that rationale you would also ban people who smoke and sky dive and have unprotected sex. Are they going to be checking to see if people are using condoms during intercourse before they let them move to New Zealand? And how would they do that check exactly?

In the case of weight, they actually use Body Mass Index that compares your weight to your height and sees if you are within the prescribed limits or not. So, they physically weigh these people and tell them if they're too fat to live in the country. That's sick.

Meddling in people's private lives started with messing with smokers. I worried at the time that it would spread to other areas of our private lives where we made decisions that our companies or governments or insurers disapproved of. And now it has. This is a terrible trend and we have to make sure it's contained. So, I propose banning New Zealanders from coming here and spreading their discriminatory policies to us.

Finally, there is good news and bad news from the British couple trying to move to New Zealand. The groom lost two inches off his waistline and he has passed the health requirements. But unfortunately, his wife still hasn't made it. So she is stuck in England, still dieting.

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An Indian man thought he was cursed by dogs, so naturally, he married one. I'm not kidding.

P Selvakumar, 33, from the Sivaganga district of India, was convinced that he had been cursed ever since he stoned two dogs to death (I don't know if he was, but he should have been). So, the Michael Vick of India decided the best idea was to marry a female dog to break the curse.

I don't know which idea was worse, stoning the other dogs to death or marrying the third to atone for it. Let's all hope he doesn't try to consummate the marriage. But since he has suffered paralysis and deafness due to his "curse" he might not be able to find or get a handle on his new bride.

I give Islam and Christianity a lot of grief for their nonsensical rules, but this takes the cake. Many people in this largely Hindu state attended the ceremony and cheered. They apparently thought Selvakumar was on to something when he came up with the brilliant idea of marrying the dog. After all, a local Hindu astrologer had suggested it. Well, then you really can't go wrong, can you?

At least, Selvakumar won't be offending anyone when he says, "Man, I married a real bitch!"

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When Paris Hilton was in jail, she spoke often about how the experience changed her and left her wanting to make the world a better place. So that's exactly what she's doing. Because the world is filled with so many intractable problems, she has chosen to target one of the most problematic -- drunken elephants. Yep. Paris is on a crusade to help stop elephants in India from getting blitzed. "The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them," she said. Let's assume that by "elephants" she means elephants, and not Britney and Lindsay.

But how can I help, you may be saying? Well, for starters, don't leave a whiskey bottle out in an area where there are elephants roaming around without supervision. And don't go to the zoo and start lobbing cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon into the elephants' habitat. And don't bring a baby elephant into a bar and hook its trunk up to the tap.

(Photo: Capla Kesting Fine Art)

Rare diseases are strange things. That probably goes without saying. But they're strange for additional reasons -- they produce a mix of pity and fascination. Regular old disease like cancer or diabetes, well, they're too close for comfort. They don't require imagination. It's all too easy to think of them in our own bodies. It's good, then, that those kind of diseases are are counterweighted by Tree Foot And Hand Disease. This incredibly rare, incredibly strange condition, which has afflicted an Indonesian fisherman, is now thought to be Human Papilloma Virus that has run amuck due to an immune deficiency. Now there is a doctor who believes that he can cure the man, who came to his attention as a result of a Discovery Channel documentary, "Half Man Half Tree."

The disease is referred to throughout the piece as a "peculiar condition," or a "rare condition," but there must be a better name. Do you have any suggestions?

Anthony Kiedis named his son Everly Bear. Milla Jovovich and Paul Thomas Anderson named their daughter Ever Gabo. Gretchen Mol named her son Ptolemy. And non-celebrities can be just as creative with the baby-naming.

We just ran this piece on Babble.com by linguist Mark Peters about current trends in names. He writes:

If you have one of those George Costanza jobs, where not much more is required than rearranging papers in an accordion-style folder and using a private bathroom that was acquired under false pretenses, then do I have a time-waster for you: the Social Security Administration's Popular Baby Names website, which tracks the 1,000 most popular male and female names since 1880.

An organization in Great Britain has compiled, taken votes on and selected the ten most absurd laws in the UK and the rest of the world. I am proud to announce that the US has four out of the top ten in the international category. No one is going to out-absurd us!

We explain some of these ludicrous laws below:



You can see the full list here.

More Ludicrous Young Turks Videos Here

The Travelodge hotel chain has reported a sevenfold increase in the incidence of nude sleepwalking. That is such a strange sentence that I will write it again. The Travelodge hotel chain has reported a sevenfold increase in the incidence of nude sleepwalking. According to the company, stress and alcohol abuse might be the culprits. Do you have any other possible explanation?

According to a recent study, the percentage of left-handers has increased from roughly 3 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century to about 11 percent now. How can we tell? Well, the paper's authors counted people who seemed to be dominantly left-handed in the films of Mitchell and Kenyon, which are considered some of the most important visual documents of Victorian life. Why would there be a difference? The speculation is that the increased popularity of standardized education and industrial machinery in the late nineteenth century led many more people to suppress their natural left-handedness. It may have also stigmatized left-handers and made them less likely to have children.

Meanwhile, enjoy this largely fake documentary about the discrimination that lefties face in everyday society.

You won't believe the headline until you actually watch the clip.
AP feeds: Field Has Another Memorable Award Speech.

Argh,

Argh argh air conditioner must argh air conditioner argh argh house woman argh fever argh argh sweating profusely.

Hold on. Let me take a breath. It might be my last. I'm down in the front yard. The husband pumped me full of buckshot.

I thought the day would be better than this. When I woke up I saw a butterfly.

I was wrong. It was a bat. It bit me. You know what happens when bats bite you? Rabies.

Check out this Magnum photo essay on Slate V. In 2002, photographer Thomas Dworzak found this stash of portraits in Afghanistan of Taliban members in odd poses that make them look like gay icons. In his narration, he says, "It's a very effeminate culture, with their black eyeliner and their little guns and flowers and holding hands and everything." Who knew?

First, check out how Colbert hyped this interview last Thursday. (This embed will die eventually, here is a backup link.)

Without further ado, the much anticipated Richard Branson Interview.

Branson knows how to get publicity, throwing water on Colbert certainly worked. This story was all over the Internet over the past couple of weeks. Colbert seemed to play along accepting an airliner named after himself and be-friending a billionaire. Let's speculate, are Colbert and Branson still cool with each other? I just read this from the AP wire.

Virgin America's scheduled 10 a.m. flight lifted off about 10:50 a.m., said spokesman Gareth Edmonson-Jones. On-board were billionaire Richard Branson and chief executive Fred Reid, who was late arriving at the airport.

Comedian Stephen Colbert, scheduled to attend a ceremony at the airport, didn't make it.

"He was in a car for 4 1/2 hours and turned around in the end," Edmonson-Jones said.