Dear Agony Aunts
I am looking for someone to waste my inheritance on.
Where should I start looking?
“Dick”
Dear “Dick”
We’ll join you for lunch on Sunday & you can just let us take it from there.
Your worries & searching are over!
Aunts
On Monday a woman posted an offer on a French website to breast-feed babies of homosexual male couples for €100 a day, just weeks after a same-sex marriage law was passed in parliament.
The post, which was confirmed as genuine & legal, says: “I am a young mother in perfect health, a trained nurse of 29, & I am renting my breasts to milk-feed infants.”
The offer, addressed to married male homosexual couples, promises up to 10 breast-feedings a day. The woman is mobile and based near Paris, it says.
Alexandre Woog, CEO of the e-loue website where the offer appeared, said: “Our legal advisers tell us that it’s illegal in France to sell human milk, but this is a person proposing a service, not selling the milk in flasks, & we are advised this is completely within the law.”
While France has legalized marriage & adoption of children by same-sex couples, it does not permit surrogacy or assisted reproduction for gay & lesbian couples.
The website confirmed that many people had already responded to the proposal.
“The lady has received more than a dozen requests, but only half of them were serious. The rest were from perverts,” said a spokesman for the website. (I could not be more surprised.)
The website, which was created in 2009 as a platform where users can offer for rent or hire anything legal online, verifies the validity of any offer that “raises eyebrows.”
I don’t know whether I am amused, horrified or just resigned.
In a move that shames the Weight Watcher’s weekly incentive scheme of a printed plastic biro, Dubai’s government announced last week that it will pay a bounty to residents, in gold, for losing weight as part of a government campaign to fight obesity.
The 30-day weight-loss challenge was launched on Friday, coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when the faithful refrain from eating & drinking between sunrise & sunset. During the festival people often eat too much after breaking the fast, enjoying super-sized portions of traditional dishes loaded with fat & sugar that push their daily calorie intake to well above levels seen during the rest of the year.
For every kilo dropped by 16th August, contestants can walk away with a gramme of gold, currently worth over $40, Dubai’s Health Minister announced as part of the “Your Weight in Gold” initiative.
The top three dieters will win special gold coins worth $5,400 & each contestant has to lose a minimum 2 kilos to qualify for the gold payout.
“Participant must reduce weight but stay away from unhealthy methods, they should be present on the final day to measure their weight loss,” the Dubai government said in a press release.
In Dubai, & the other emirates, oil wealth & high incomes have led to overeating, high-sugar diets & a heavy reliance on cars for even the shortest journeys, leading to a drastic increase in diabetes & other obesity-related illnesses.
Dubai has a history of larger-than-life offers. It has previously given away luxury cars & yachts in lucky draws & is home to the largest gold market in the region. It even has gold vending machines in its shopping malls.
Anybody remember Aristotle’s story about Midas?
Discount retailer Lidl faces a €200,000 Christmas dinner bill after an offer of chicken vol-au-vents & ice cream cake for the poor went viral.
The supermarket launched a Twitter campaign in Belgium this week, saying it would hand out 5 four-course Christmas dinners to food banks for each tweet on a hash tag.
Lidl had expected to hand out about 1,000 of the €20 dinner packs, consisting of tomato soup, vol-au-vents with chips, an ice-cream cake & chocolates, a spokesman for the German-based company’s Belgium unit said on Wednesday.
But local newspapers wrote about the offer & 1.500 people retweeted using the hash tag – #luxevooriedereen (Dutch for “luxury for everyone”).
By the end of the 24-hour campaign Lidl was committed to delivering 7,500 dinners. To quell rumors that the store chain had been caught-out, Lidl rounded up the number of dinners to 10,000, & branded the campaign “a success”.
Lidl said it had not yet decided whether to repeat the exercise next year.
“We’ve learnt quite a few lessons over the past 48 hours, to say the least,” a spokesman said.
Not quite a balanced diet, but very welcome at this time of year, no doubt.
ThursdayAgain 
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