The AIR MAIL Diary

A whole-earth catalogue.

The infamous Macron slap, Olympic sperm racers, Céline Dion’s G.D.P. bump, and other strange stories from around the globe …

By George Kalogerakis

We’re still processing the news from Al Bahnasa —site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus? Just south of Cairo? —where,Scientific American reported, an excavation team found “a sheet of papyrus inside [a] mummy’s abdomen that contained text from the Iliad, the ancient Greek poet Homer’s epic account of the siege of Troy. ” Just a “passage,” fortunately, not all 15,693 lines. But that’s still a lot to swallow. Why don’t you all go on ahead.

More than 10,000 men have reportedly applied to compete for a prize of $100,000 here next month in the Sperm Racing Olympics, in which “semen samples from 128 men, each representing a different country, go head-to-head on a microscopic race track,” said the READ ON