News for Youse: Shakira battles sea lion while Kubrick’s boxes wash up on Oregon beach

Worst she-wolf, ever. According to a hard-hitting story posted over at the website of People magazine, Latin firecracker Shakira (all Latins are firecrackers—FACT!) barely escaped from a bloody and exhausting deathmatch with a sea lion last weekend while vacationing in South Africa. (Linky linky)

As she wrote on her Facebook page, Shakira was trying to take some pictures of the sea lions with a phone she presumably packs in the front end of her thong when one of them “jumped out of the water so fast and impetuously that it got about one foot away from me, looked me in the eye, roared in fury, and tried to bite me."

The singer figures the beast was “confused” by the glint from her Blackberry, which is the second daftest thing you’ll read all day. The first daftest thing you’ll read all day is that she was heroically rescued from a certain mauling by her quick-thinking brother, “Super Tony”.

Yes, Shakira’s brother is apparently named “Super Tony”. And if you think that’s silly, how about this:

Dozens of mysterious and impenetrable metal boxes are surfacing along the coast of Oregon. As reported at length on the website Huliq, “They can’t be moved; even when yanked by a four-wheel drive truck pulling on heavy chains tied around these humming metal boxes that are still appearing as of Feb. 8 up and down West Coast beaches.” (read all about it, here.)

The boxes are five feet square, 22” deep, have no seams or markings, and their appearance—according to residents in the area of Bray’s Point—coincided with bizarre noises, strange lights, and (that’s right!), UFOs.

So far, so ridiculous, you say. And fair enough—News for Youse was prepared to view this story as an elaborate viral marketing campaign for John Lydon’s recently reformed Public Image Limited, if it wasn’t for recently declassified reports showing that the British government was also investigating similar artefacts which “appeared suddenly, and after numerous reported UFO sightings” in Sri Lanka in the late ‘90s and mid-2000s.

Too bad the MoD didn’t ask Sri Lanka resident and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke for his take on the humming black boxes. He’s gone now, leaving it up to Oregon Forest Service fish biologists to investigate. If News for Youse had its way, we’d have Super Tony on the case, pronto.