QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
In its latest experiment with live coverage of mundane events, Norway’s public broadcasting network plans to dedicate five hours of air-time to an attempt to break the knitting world record.
The NRK network says the Nov 1 broadcast will be preceded by a four-hour documentary on how the wool off a sheep’s back turns into a sweater.
NRK producer Rune Moeklebust said on Friday that “it’s kind of ordinary TV but very slow, although they’ll be knitting as fast as they can”. The Norwegians hope to break the current non-stop knitting record of 4 hours 50 minutes, held by Australia.
USA: An Oregon bartender got the tip of a lifetime this week.
The Register-Guard newspaper reported that a customer at Conway’s Restaurant and Lounge in Springfield often tips bartender Aurora Kephart with unplayed tickets for the state lottery’s Keno game.
This time, one of those tickets turned into a $17,500 (€12,900) winner. Ms Kephart, 25, says the look on the customer’s face was incredible. She tried to give him back the ticket but he would not take it. After collecting her money, she gave the patron some of her winnings.
The London cab is to make an appearance Down Under — but coloured white rather than the traditional black.
The London Taxi Company has exported a test sample of 98 TX4 taxis to the Western Australian city of Perth where they will under go trials over the next few weeks.
It has been thought fit to paint the cabs white to take account of the perpetual Perth sunshine.
More than 20% of holidaymakers are tormented by “tag-along tourists” they cannot shake off, according to a survey.
Nearly all of those affected dropped hints that they preferred to be alone, the poll by travel agency sunshine.co.uk found.
Some tethered to the tag-alongs admitted they had made the mistake of speaking to the others first.
Alan Sugar has been investigated by police after he was accused a posting a racist message on Twitter.
The tycoon posted a photograph of a crying Chinese child and joked: “The kid in the middle is upset because he was told off for leaving the production line of the iPhone 5.”
Shop owner Nichola Szeto, from Liverpool, was offended by the reference to the Asian factories where the mobiles are produced and sent a complaint about the “racist tweets” to the Metropolitan Police.
The sudden appearance of old $100 bills in South Carolina has led to the arrest of two air conditioning workers.
Police say 87-year-old Lois Brown told the workers that her husband hid $100,000 in the basement just before he died in 2003 in Gaffney. Ms Brown told the workers that if they discovered the cash, she would give them a big reward.
Investigators say 50-year-old Joey Reed and 47-year-old Elie Spencer found the money during the Sept 2010 work, but did not tell Ms Brown. Instead they started buying a used car and a TV with bills so old they did not have the security thread or off-centre Benjamin Franklin portrait. The men are charged with grand larceny.
A Colombian city claimed to set a world record on Friday after 13,800 people gathered in a town square for a cup of coffee, a feat designed to promote the beverage in a nation that grows the beans but consumes little.
The event was organised by local authorities in the eastern province of Boyaca and the farmer-funded National Federation of Coffee Producers in the world’s biggest producer of smooth-tasting ‘washed’ arabicas. The organisers said they have submitted evidence of the event held in Boyaca’s capital, Tunja, to Guinness World Records.
The Guinness website says the largest ever “coffee party” was in Cologne, Germany, in 2009, at which 8,162 participants were served iced coffee.
In Columbia, per capita consumption is less than half than that in the US and about a quarter of that of Scandinavia.
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