Today, Peruvian police seized 1,540 lbs of cocaine hidden in frozen giant squid destined for Mexico and the United States.

The drugs were covered in pepper to divert sniffer dogs and sealed in several layers of plastic and other wrappers. Police had been on the trail since August.

Seven people were arrested in the drug seizure. Police said the haul would have a street value of about $17.5 million.

I may be wrong, but I thought that giant squid was very rare. I know that one washes up on a beach every now and then, but it’s usually treated as a big news event and what’s left of the dead squid goes off to some lab or another to be studied. One wonders what the delivery address on that package was? That’s a lot of squid, to hide 1,540 lbs of coke.

I started speculating what would happen if that giant squid shipment got mixed up with a shipment of more common calamari destined for, say, McCormick’s or Jake’s.

What would the chef do with our coke-enhanced giant squid? Would it be served with a … special… breading? Would happy hour be really, really happy? Would customers eat it with that much pepper on it?

But then, of course, one wonders about the disappointment of the intended target when they received a large shipment of more common, non-enhanced squid with a more mundane street value. But maybe they could sell it to a local restaurant.

New York City officials were a bit embarassed to find out that ads for a clothing line that have been appearing on New York buses since September promise reading can be rewarded in unexpected ways.

The ads show a suggestively posed and scantily clad woman kneeling among a pile of books with the snappy slogan, “Read Books, Get Brain.”

Officials were apparently unaware that “get brain” is slang for oral sex.

After being tipped to the phrases double meaning, Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman Tom Kelly ran a little test of his own:

I went downstairs to the mailroom and showed some of the young guys a copy of the ad. I was watching their faces and they all start smirking.

Apparently it’s on all the music, in music that’s how they refer to it. I didn’t know anything about it and I’m sure the people that approved the ad didn’t.

To me and I believe to everyone else, while it was done by a clothing line, it would give the impression that it was also promoting reading and literacy.

The ads, from Akademiks, which intended the double-entendre, also run on buses and bus shelters in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco and Philadelphia. But the ads are no longer running in New York — they were stripped off buses on Friday. 😆

A man was stuck inside a chimney in North Portland this morning, apparently attempting to burgle a house.

The man had managed to get approximately 10 or 15 feet down in the chimney before becoming stuck. Extracting him took more than an hour and required tearing down the chimney and removing sections of the roof.

Since he was not the homeowner, and I guess could not prove he was Santa on a test run, the man was assumed to be a burglar and was arrested when he emerged.

This is a rather strange story that reminded me a lot of high school and why I never want to go back there.

Iran has banned soccer players from sporting ponytails and sculpted beards as part of a campaign to prevent the spread of Western culture in the Islamic state, a soccer federation official said on Thursday.

The federation said those who defied the order ran the risk of being banned from the game.

[…]The ban does not apply to long hair.

“The Prophet Mohammad had long hair. We have no problem with it,” Majd said.

I hate to admit how long ago I was in high school. Let’s just say that the memory this brought back was circa late 60’s, and leave it at that. There were three high schools in my small town. They followed to varying degrees the ultra-conservative directives given by the unofficial town religion (that my family did not belong to). Unlike the Iranian officials, whether Mohammad, or Jesus for that matter, had long hair was irrelevant. No boy was going to graduate from high school if he looked like a hippy. There was at least one boy I knew who was forced to repeat his senior year because he refused to cut his hair. The fact that his grades were good meant nothing. Everything focused on whether his hair hit his collar or not.

Stupid.

But maybe we just need to wait another 30 or 40 years and the Iranian culture will begin to ease off a bit? Maybe if we passed out love beads and flowers to them? Sure. Why not?

Iranian soccer officials, I’m thinking, need to talk to our own Blazer’s officials regarding what happens when a team alienates its fan base:

A crowd of 110,000 watched a match between Iran and Germany in Tehran earlier this month. Iranian women were not allowed to see the match after the football federation upheld a ban on them entering stadiums even though women are the Islamic country’s most passionate fans.

That doesn’t seem like an extremely intelligent move to me. But maybe that’s why I’m not in marketing.

Breast implants are becoming more and more popular with a rather surprising selection of Shanghai citizens — men. The implants are similar to the ones used by women, except they are shaped differently and are stiffer. The apparently desired result is to make those pecs look buff without the bother of exercising.

“To be frank, surgery is unnecessary,” Liu Chunlong, from the Shanghai Ren’ai Hospital, was quoted as saying.

“Physical exercise can create the same effect and it is safer.”

He said the hospital had received 40 patients this year and operated on 10, compared with just two or three such operations last year.

He said many of the patients had psychological problems.

“They ascribe the unhappiness in their lives to their weak muscles,” he was quoted as saying.

“The surgery, in some instances, serves as psychological therapy.”

Uh… wouldn’t it be cheaper and safer to just hire a personal trainer and see a shrink?

A Finnish commuter ferry captain has been suspended after forgetting to turn off the autopilot and crashing into a pier — twice.

I can understand once. But twice?

After running the same route for 10 years, last Tuesday he for some reason forgot that the autopilot was engaged. Two passengers and one crew member were injured when the ferry crashed into the pier. He was given a dressing down by the ferry company. But he was also given a second chance.

Back he went to his usual route. On Thursday, forgetting again that the autopilot was engaged, he headed for the same stop. This time nobody was injured, but the pier was totally demolished.

He was not drinking on either occasion. But the ferry company was unable to say when, or if, he would be returning to his job.

I think they’ll have to rebuild the pier first.