That’s Odd

involved in such crimes.

The fellowship is being rolled out by the Human Rights Commission and Office of Economic and Workforce Development and is funded through the Dream Keeper Initiative, which is San Francisco’s program that works to redirect funding into the Black community. It will launch in October.

“It’s not necessarily as cut and dry as folks may think. It’s not as transactional as, ‘Here’s a few dollars so that you don’t do something bad,’ but it really is about how you help us improve public safety in the neighborhood,” Sheryl Davis, executive director of the Human Rights Commission, said.

Participants of the program will be paired with life coaches from the city’s Street Violence Intervention Program and will serve as “community ambassadors.” Participants are also eligible to receive an additional $200 per month through working, going to school or being a mediator in potentially violent situations.

Payments are made in the form of gift cards and will be monitored.

Shootings have spiked in the city this year, with 119 recorded gun crime victims in the first half of the year, which is double the number during the same timeframe in 2020.

The program follows a similar one in Richmond, California, which was dubbed “cash for criminals” by the media after gun crimes increased. A 2019 study credited the program with helping reduce gun homicides in the city by 55%.

Critics of the program have pointed out that similar initiatives haven’t been very successful.

The move comes as California also works to become the first state to pay drug addicts a few hundred dollars to stay sober. Gov. Gavin Newsom asked the federal government last week for permission to use tax dollars to pay for the program through Medicaid. Meanwhile, a similar proposal is also working through California’s Legislature, with the state Senate already passing the bill.

Flying High

A 13-year-old in Japan is climbing the ceilings.

Fuyuki Kono recently broke two Guinness World Records for spinning in an indoor skydiving tunnel.

Kono, whose passion for indoor skydiving was kindled while she was studying abroad in Australia in 2018, broke the records for the most front split spins in one minute and the most 360 horizontal spins in one minute at the indoor skydiving center in Saitama, Japan.

She managed to do 78 front split spins in one minute and 60 horizontal spins in the allotted time.

According to Kono, practice makes perfect. She trained for nearly three months to achieve the feat.

“I repeated the movement over and over to go beyond my limit,” Kono told Guinness World Records.

“Because the wind blows from the bottom up, a slight glitch in position could easily put me off balance. You can easily go off center, and you could even hit the wall if you’re not careful.”

Sounds like she’s living the high life.

Cargo Crew

It took a team of eight Ukrainian strongmen 1 minute and 14 seconds to pull the world’s largest and heaviest cargo plane 14 feet.

The team of bodybuilders hauled the Antonov An-225 Mriya, a 628,300-pound cargo plane built in 1988 in the Soviet Union, on the tarmac at Hostomel Airport, northwest of Kiev. The feat, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, was declared a record by Ukraine’s national record book. The last time the achievement was attempted, in 2013, there were ten men pulling the plane.

Sounds pretty impressive to me.

66 Countries at Age 70

Dr. Sudha Mahalingam has been around the block. The 70-year-old woman from India has visited 66 countries, spanning six continents, over the past two decades.

Two decades ago, Mahalingam quit her job in mainstream print journalism and switched careers to take up energy research. Soon after, she started receiving invitations to speak at international conferences in oil-producing countries and the world of travel opened up to her.

Mahalingam keeps track on her travels on her blog, Footloose Indian, as well as in her book “The Travel G-ds Must be Crazy.”

Owing to a hectic schedule of managing work and family, Mahalingam often had no time to organize her travel, so most of her early trips were sudden and unplanned.

She landed in the Czech Republic without a valid visa, faced the challenge of finding vegetarian food in China, got accidentally locked in a monument in Iran, and was caught without proof of a yellow fever vaccination at the airport in Nairobi, Kenya.

Her most recent international trip, to see lemurs in Madagascar in 2019, was one of her favorite adventurous moments.

“It was absolutely uncharted territory, un-touristy and had very few facilities. It was hardship travel and the way that I like. I was on a boat for three days and the boat didn’t have a toilet,” says Mahalingam of the ride up the Tsiribihina River to Tsingy on the western coast of Madagascar.

“Tsingy is full of jagged bladelike rock formations jutting straight into the sky. It’s quite steep and very difficult to climb these rocks and it lacerates the hand and foot. But after climbing to the other side, you see creatures you don’t see elsewhere in

Madagascar.”

Another adventure that stands out for Mahalingam was her trip to Borneo in Southeast Asia.

“There were creepy crawlies everywhere and mounds of leaves one meter high. You put your foot and won’t know if a serpent would twist itself around your leg or whether a scorpion would sting you. It was pouring all the time. I have been to the Amazon jungle as well but it was a cakewalk compared to Borneo,” she says.

Mahalingam doesn’t just let her feet do the walking when she visits a new country. She has scuba-dived and went hang-gliding. She’s also trekked to Everest base camp and, at the age of 66, went skydiving in Uluru, Australia.

Staying in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, visiting the Galapagos Islands, trekking for 24 days to reach Mustang in Nepal, and meeting people like the Drukpa, who live in harsh climatic conditions and are welcoming and happy, have been experiences that humbled her.

Although the pandemic put the brakes on some of her travel, Mahalingam has used the time to travel within her own country.

When the world fully reopens, she wants to train to sail aboard one of the famed Clipper yachts, an expensive but once in a lifetime experience.

And she wants to keep on going.

“Even if I travel to three places every year over the next 10 years, I will not be completing my checklist. There’s quite a lot!” she admits.

Bon voyage!

Monkey Business

Adie Timmermans has been friends with Chita for a while. She has been visiting Chita weekly for years. That is, until recently, when she was told she can no longer visit her special friend.

Chita, though, is no ordinary friend. Chita is a 38-year-old chimpanzee. Adie is a woman. They have been meeting at the Antwerp Zoo, where Adie greets Chita at the glass and waves and blows kisses at him.

But zookeepers are worried that Chita is being shunned by his primate peers because of his friendship with Adie. They are asking Adie to sever her friendship with the animal and have banned her from the zoo. Adie is distraught.

“I love that animal and he loves me,” she said. “I haven’t got anything else. Why do they want to take that away?”

She added, “Other dozens of visitors are allowed to make contact. Then why not me?”

The zoo responded, “An animal that is too focused on people is less respected by its peers. We want Chita to be a chimpanzee as much as possible. Outside of visiting hours at the zoo, he has to manage 15 hours [a day] in his group. We want to give him the chance to be as happy as possible.”

According to the zoo spokesperson, the other chimpanzees exclude him when he has contact with humans.

“When Chita is constantly busy with visitors, the other monkeys ignore him and don’t consider him part of the group, even though that is important. He then sits on his own outside of visiting hours,” said the spokesperson.

It’s possible that Chita will never be able to fully integrate with his peers.

And there’s no monkeying around about that.