The Free Press, Mankato, MN

Local News

September 8, 2010

Weird News: Gangs with fashion statements

By Chuck Shepherd Universal Press Syndicate

NEW YORK — In 2007 News of the Weird highlighted the clothes cults of impoverished Congo: “In (the country that) has lost an estimated 4 million people in the civil wars of the last decade and where many must get by on about 30 cents a day, ’gangs’ of designer-clothes-wearing men” have fashion smackdowns in the streets of Kinshasa to prove that Versace and Gucci styles look better on them than on others. These “sapeurs” (from the French slang for clothes) continue to strut their genuine Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana, according to a March Washington Post dispatch. One sapeur, “Luzolo,” who lives in a one-room shack with no bed, no water and no electricity (but a closetful of designer outfits) describes the feeling as “like a spirit that comes in me.” When he wears “the labels,” he said, “I feel there is no one above me.”

Good babies

Again this year, in April, the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo hosted the possibly-400-year-old Naki Sumo (“crying baby contest”), in which infants are blessed to good health by having sumo wrestlers hoist them into the air, hold them at arm’s length, and coax them (no squeezing!) to cry, thus signaling that the offering has been heard.

This year, 80 babies were glorified, with special spiritual favors afforded those who cried the loudest and the longest.

 

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