Central Park Safari for Tasty Weeds Stirs Up Rhubarb

--Strange sights are commonplace in New York City, and the small band following the bearded man in the white pith helmet didn’t attract much attention--until they started eating the weeds. Steve Brill makes his living as an urban Euell Gibbons, teaching hundreds of city dwellers how to forage for wild munchies in the middle of the metropolis. His four-hour, $15 tour of Central Park fills the foragers’ bags with wild black cherries, blueberries, water mint, mustard, sorrel, rhubarb, bay leaves and even coffee beans, along with several obscure but tasty weeds. There’s just one problem--park officials argue that the tasty tidbits rightfully belong to the wildlife. “We’re not out to feed the population,” said Bill Dalton, director of the city Parks Enforcement Patrol. “Can you imagine what would happen if all New Yorkers descended on Central Park wanting to make a wild dandelion salad?” Brill doesn’t see any need to worry. “Most of these edible plants are common weeds that are mowed down by the thousands,” he insisted.

--Waldemar Kaczmarski, a Pole who jumped ship to seek a new life in America, marked the start of his second year in the United States with a party celebrating his admission to the University of Detroit’s architecture school. Kaczmarski and a shipmate, Grzegorz Solowiej, were granted political asylum.

--”There is no concern in eating a living fish,” but “eating a locust that has not yet grown wings and cannot fly is unlawful,” the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini says in a book containing 3,000 aphorisms of the Shia Muslim leader. The 432-page book is considered to be the first complete English translation of the religious “purity code” of the Iranian Shia sect of Islam. Demand for the book has not been great--it has sold 645 copies.

--Handling large sums of money is nothing new for Fred McCullough. He is the president of the Bank of Gibson City, Ill. But the $15-million Illinois lottery prize did get his attention, McCullough, 51, said on learning Monday that he was the only person to choose all six numbers correctly. He will receive a check for $750,000 for each of the next 20 years. McCullough, who says he has no immediate plans to retire, said he does not play the lottery often. “This could possibly be, maybe, the 10th time that I’ve ever bought tickets,” he said. And he says he likely won’t play again. “I would say probably that I’ll let it go at that.”