Putting a brave face on plastic surgery and snake charming

Usually it is simple human vanity--a desire somehow to turn back the ravages of time and be young again for a while--that causes people to submit to the knife and wiles of the plastic surgeon.

But from Brazil, the plastic-surgery capital of the world, comes another reason to get the old face worked on a bit. Sapaim, the ancient shaman of the Camaiura tribe (who told reporters he knew not how old he is) agreed to have a face-lift after a spirit appeared to him in a dream and said it would be okay.

He was the first of the country's estimated 500,000 Indians to undergo plastic surgery, the procedures and results of which are even more popular in Brazil than they are in the United States. According to a dispatch from Reuters, the spiritual leader of the Camaiuras, whose home is in the southern Amazon region, responded to the operation with the simple observation that his face felt "like new."

The operation was performed gratis by one of the nation's most famous plastic surgeons, who stretched the shaman's cheeks and removed fat from under his eyes.

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, a professional snake charmer named Dudu Miah triggered panic in a neighborhood in Narayanganj, a suburb of the capital city of Dhaka. Miah's expertise had been called upon by a home owner who discovered two large, highly venomous cobras on his property.

That wasn't news; cobras often live in Bangladeshi houses and feed on rodents. But when the longtime serpent stalker dug beneath the floors of that house, and one next to it, he found what Reuters vividly described as a "slithering stockpile" of serpents. Altogether, Miah counted more than 3,000 cobras of various sizes and ages, along with hundreds of eggs that would have hatched in the near future. It was a discovery that caused the neighborhood to empty fast, police said.