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tiger has turned pacifist. Provided with a live goat for his dinner, the big cat befriended it instead of eating it. Tiger and goat played in the enclosure's pool together. Zookeepers decided to starve the tiger to give him no choice but to chow down on his new buddy. But the new two friends fasted together instead.

After two days, staff rescued the goat and provided the tiger with a portion of raw beef instead, said the report in the Times of India.

The zookeepers at the Bor wildlife sanctuary in Maharashtra, India, insisted they were not being horrible, but were doing a scientific experiment to see whether the tiger was ready to be released back into the wild.

I think the goat should have been given some sort of medal for its ordeal, spending a long time trapped in a small space with a hungry tiger. (This could make a good book or a film: Wonder if anyone has thought of it yet?)

It strikes me that the same 'I-lived-with-a-dangerous-animal' award should go to anyone who has ever shared a home with Charlie Sheen, Britney Spears, Ike Turner, my children, etc.

The goat's miraculous story of survival could have made the zoo world famous. So what did the idiotic staff do? They threw the goat into a nearby cage occupied by the tiger's two sisters, who immediately ate it.

Zookeepers appeared surprised that the female of the species was tougher and more ruthless than the male. These monstrous people seem to know nothing at all about basic biology. Do they not have wives or girlfriends?

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If you put on Google Glasses, you can identify the buildings in your street, store in a memory file everything you see and hear, identify restaurants around you, etc., etc. Amazing. It would be like having a brain.

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Chinese TV is now so bad that producers have to pay audience members to laugh or cry. The going rate is 100 to 300 renminbi (US$16 to $48) per day. If you can make yourself weep uncontrollably or roar with hysterically laughter, you can get your fee banged up to 700 renminbi.

The system was exposed by the Yancheng Evening News, whose reporters found job adverts offering people cash to be TV audiences. Among the shows which pay for fake emotion, the report said, was a Hunan TV series about singers called I Am A Singer. The creativity level of the title says it all.

To be frank, watching five minutes of ANY mainland China TV channel, especially the news ones, makes me want to cry, fall wailing to the floor or throw myself out of the hotel window.

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Junior despot Kim Jong Un issued his women soldiers with sexy high-heeled platform shoes as part of their official uniform, it was revealed last week. They certainly look good, but I worry about their efficacy on the battlefield. One of my colleagues wears them and gets stuck to manhole covers and escalators several times a day. If this is the cute army with which Kim is going to launch world war three, I say: Bring it on.

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Thought for the day: Life is too short to spend it worrying about how short life is.

The writer is a columnist and journalist.