Funny old world: The week's offbeat news

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From a storm brewing in Japan over the price of a cup of English tea to Australia’s Houdini dachshund … your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.

A proper cup of tea. British royal family fan Jan Hugo © DAVID GRAY / AFP

Not their cup of tea

$35 (R643). That’s how much a cup of tea will cost you at the British pavilion at the Osaka Expo. Japan is justifiably aghast.

The ferociously expensive English tea ceremony consists of “a tea bag stuck in a paper cup”, according to a post on X that went viral.

As the horror grew, the British Embassy promised to replace the paper cups with china ones.

“Afternoon tea is an important part of our tradition that symbolises British culture,” an official insisted in an apologetic video.

The storm in a paper cup is not the only debacle to have hit the world fair in Japan’s second city.

A propeller fell off one of its futuristic “flying cars”, and its self-driving shuttle bus services had to be paused after one of them ran into a wall.

Houdini hound found

The runaway miniature dachshund dog that led Australia on a merry dance is finally back with its owners after going for a walk on the wild side for a year and a half.

Valerie became the world’s most written about sausage dog after going AWOL on a camping trip to Kangaroo Island in November 2023, evading all attempts to catch her for 529 days.

She somehow survived alongside snappy sea lions, possums and penguins on the wild, windswept island off Adelaide, with many writing her off as a goner.

But volunteers refused to give up on her, clocking up thousands of kilometres in searches and deploying cameras and traps.

Then after more than a year, the missing mutt was spotted, still sporting her pink collar. But she still evaded all attempts to catch her with an exasperated wildlife expert admitting last month that “Valerie seems impossible to trap”.

Finally she was lured into a crate by the scent of a shirt from her owner Georgia Gardner.

Wildlife rescuer Jared Karran couldn’t believe how small the miniature dog was when he finally got his hands on her.

“She is tiny… with an inch clearance under her belly (and) tiny little legs.”

Spermula 1’s boy racers

It might seem like a gross schoolboy joke, but the organisers of the world’s first sperm race insist they are deadly serious about falling male fertility.

Los Angeles high school student Eric Zhu raised more than a million dollars to stage the showdown between seed taken from three young American men.

The “Spermula 1” race down tiny tubular “tracks” was magnified 100 times under a microscope in front of cheering crowds and broadcast live on YouTube.

“I’m not like an Elon Musk, who wants to repopulate the Earth,” Zhu told AFP, referring to the Tesla boss who has reportedly fathered 14 children so far.

He said he just wanted to urge young men to look after their bodies better.

Putting us all to shame

***The war veteran celebrated her 100th birthday in October but still teaches yoga to a class of students © Adrian DENNIS / AFP***

They do not make them like Dorothea Barron anymore.

The 100-year-old D-Day veteran still teaches yoga every Monday near her home in southern England, doing downward dog poses with her heels flat on the ground as her pupils – some a quarter of her age – groan on their mats.

“I feel lovely, relaxed and stretched,” she told AFP after we caught up with her on her walk home afterwards.