From frogs to the fruit of your loins

Picture the scene: it's a hot sunny day and you have a raging thirst. You reach for an ice-cold can of fizzy pop and take a swig... But there's a blob in your drink, a blob that on closer inspection turns out to be a frog.

Permit me a small ewwwwwww! at this point, if you will.

Independent tests have confirmed that the creature inside Fred DeNegri of Ormond Beach's can of Pepsi was a frog, though he might have been forgiven for thinking it was a extraterrestrial; after all, if a can of Coca-Cola can munch through a T-bone steak in a few hours, imagine what Pepsi can do to a small amphibian!

Someone with alleged first-hand experience of close encounters of the third kind is the wife of Japan's future prime minister.

That's right; the First Lady-to-be, Miyuki Hatoyama, claims to have been taken on an alien spaceship to Venus some 20 years ago.

But do you know the best bit about this story? The fact that she was annoyed at her then-hubby, who told her it was probably just a dream - her new man (who's soon to be in charge of a whole country) has a different way of thinking. "He would surely say 'Oh, that's great,'" she says.

Is the recession getting you down? A growing self-help trend in the UK is DIY butchery, according to this article.

Dozens of fancy Londoners are donning a blood-stained jacket and getting their hands dirty to find out more about where their meat comes from and how best to handle it.

From bankers to housewives, many people - including lots of ladies - are trying the courses on offer at Marylebone's The Ginger Pig where you can learn how to prepare fillet, sirloin, rump or rib-eye and take your juicy piece home afterwards too.

I abandoned the first link I wrote to tie in with this next piece, so let's just play this straight.

Good news for Wang Hao, China's 25-year-old world number one table tennis player: the game's officials have finally deemed him old enough to be allowed a girlfriend.

Good old Hao has come of age and his new relationship with former national champion Peng Luyang has been given the seal of approval by national team manager Huang Biao.

He had caused controversy in 2004 when he started going out with fellow national team player Fan Ying.

"In a move that dismayed women's rights activists but was perhaps more about their relative world rankings, Wang was not punished but 17-year-old Fan was dismissed from the national team and sent back to her province."

Lucky for Luyang that they've got the all-clear...

And finally, no snark, no word about gross overpopulation of the planet, just the simple story of a woman, her husband and their 19 children.

Well, technically number 19 is yet to be born, so it's a woman, her husband, and their 18 children - plus their soon-to-be grandchildren too!

42-year-old Michelle Duggar of Arkansas is gearing up to be a grandparent for the first time so she was understandably shocked to discover she was pregnant again after taking a pregnancy test "on a whim".

Mind you, after all the other times you would think she knows what it feels like by now, surely!