He Stopped Lion Down on the Job

The biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den probably pales in comparison to this modern-day tale of Mike Oosterlaak’s confinement in the lion’s den. Oosterlaak of South Africa celebrated an unusual feat Sunday, ending a stay of 64 days and 7 hours with seven full-grown lions in a zoo in Haartebeespoort, South Africa. Oosterlaak, who calls himself a free-lance game catcher, walked out of the cage, gulped down some Champagne and said: “Never again.” His aim was to raise $250,000 to buy two gorillas for the zoo, but his bravery only netted $1,000. Each day, for 30 minutes, he would leave the cage to shower, and his only weapon while in captivity was a wooden club, which he broke while trying to fend off an inquisitive lion. On the day before he established what is perhaps a world record, Oosterlaak said that a lion destroyed most of the 400 pages of notes he had taken. Of his ordeal, Oosterlaak said: “I’ve been dragged out of bed, had my jacket torn off my back and my mattress torn to shreds. . . . A heavyweight boxer hasn’t got a right hook like a lion.”

--It is a long way from the jungles of Cambodia to the lush greenery of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. And Sathaya Tor, who was graduated Sunday from the prep school, three days after a reunion with his parents, will never forget the grim days leading up to his journey to the United States in 1980. Separated from his parents in the chaos that was Cambodia in 1975, when the Communist Khmer Rouge held sway, Tor, 19, witnessed genocide, was forced to dig mass graves in the jungles and subsisted on frogs and crickets. “All year long you worked planting rice, digging canals--but sometimes they turn into mass graves where they execute people,” he said. Tor’s sister, who was in a Thailand refugee camp, helped him obtain a visa to the United States. Now, it’s off to Stanford University.

--Numbers count a lot, especially in bowl games. And so it was in Battle Creek, Mich., home of Kellogg’s, over the weekend when the city recaptured the “Breakfast Bowl” title from Springfield, Mass., after organizers served breakfast to a record 30,413 people at a record-size table 3,700 feet long in a downtown mall. But Springfield, which won the title last month by serving 27,067 people at a 3,600-foot-long table, was not about to take defeat sitting down. Ex-Springfield Mayor William Sullivan charged that the Battle Creek table was crooked. “I can see you had the number, but the longest table stays in the city of Springfield,” Sullivan said. “We won two out of three--the length of the table and the number of people,” Battle Creek Mayor Albert Bobrofsky said. “We’ll concede they had the longest straight line.”