Flash in the Pan

• Butter Statues - Every year, the Iowa State Fair has big statues made of butter. Making the public vote cut: 40th anniversary of the moon landing. What didn't? Michael Jackson, presumably doing the moon walk. (AP)


• Chilling Cattle - Heat waves in Veneto, Italy is driving farmers to try showers and fans to keep their cattle cool. (UPI)


• That's Mr. Cupcake to You - Guinness certified the world's largest cupcake at 150 pounds, 15 pounds of filling, and 60 pounds of icing. (UPI)


• Did He Spill A Drop? - A Vermont police officer pulled over a driver for drunk driving. What made him suspect? The glass of beer left on the trunk. (AP)


• No Hot Dogging - The Oscar Meyer Weinermobile crashed into a Wisconson home. Was it shaped like a bun? (AP)


• Laurent Ponsot, Wine Detective - Ponsot, a former vintner, tracks fake wine. (Financial Times)


• And Nabbing a Vintage Villain - French police arrested a man who allegedly stole 500 bottles of wine, worth millions of dollars, from top Parisian restaurants. (AFP)


• Making Lemonade - Seven Pennsylvania children got into trouble with the police for selling lemonade without a permit. (AP)


• Onion Juice - A new system converts onion juice into a different type of juice -- electricity. (Reuters)


• Sub Swiping - A serial robber in Florida seems to favor sub sandwich chain stores. (UPI)


• Jail B&B - A Missouri jail is raising money for new mattresses by letting people stay overnight in a new addition. Comes with snacks, mug shots, and shirts. But how about the cake with a file inside? (AP)


• Doesn't Melt In Your Hands - Swiss chocolate maker Barry Callebaut says it has a melt-resistant version of the treat. (UPI)


• Meatball Mania - A Chicago restaurant is prepping 200 pounds of beef for the American Meatball Eating Championship. (UPI)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Eat It and Like It - A 71-year-old man complained to his 66-year-old common law wife about her bad cooking. She allegedly beat him and apparently told deputies, upon her arrest, that she had been drunk and burned the bread. Toast, anyone? (AP)


• Cops Own Doughnut Shop - Some Michigan police really wanted their doughnuts, so when the owners of the local shop were planning to close it, nine officers chipped in and bought it. (UPI)


• Have Cork, Will Travel - A service offering a select few consultations from top sommeliers has an entry fee of £50,000, or about $81,000, and that doesn't include the wine. Check the ins and outs of adding a temperature recorder to a case of wine to make sure it didn't get overheated. Alas, it did. (Financial Times)


• Here Comes the Orient Express - Some top British chefs are creating dishes for toddlers, hoping to get kids into restaurants. What are the chances that they still ask for grilled cheese and chicken fingers? (UPI)


• Pastel, Stale, and Coming for You - The first store devoted to selling Peeps is scheduled to open. It won't just be the marshmellow concoctions (whether dream or nightmare is up to you), but also such things as t-shirts, plush toys, and pillows. In a blind taste test, could anyone tell the difference? (Washington Post)


• Water into Wine - A German company claiming that its powerder turns water into Chianti is angering Italian farmers. I'm betting that the Catholic Church does not have a stake in the venture. (UPI)


• Dining the Parisian Way - You can get a great meal in Paris, but only when the restaurants are willing to give it to you. It seems that only recently has it been possible to find establishments open on weekends. (Financial Times)


• Egg Foo Young for Everyone - A crash between a truck and a car sent an estimated 9,000 pounds of Chinese food spilling onto a Chicago toll road. No one was seriously hurt, but no word on what the what the fortune cookies read. (UPI)


• Chicken Feet: Take a Hike - As part of a trade war, China is prohibiting the importing of U.S. chicken, about half of which is chicken feet. (Reuters)


• Mediterranean Britain? - Climate change is bringing some differences in British agriculture, including growing peaches, olives, and pecans. (Daily Telegraph)


• Burger Blooper - Burger King has to apologize for depicting in an ad a Hindu deity eating a beef burger, showing that the company had no regard for sacred cows. (UPI)


• Who Took the Cheese? - There has been such an upsurge in people stealing cheese from a British grocery chain that it is adding security tags to the product. (UPI)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Cross-Species Competitive Eating - In the world of pigging out, it's animals 1, humans, zip. (AP)


• Big Value in Small Change - A pub customer paid for his pint and received as part of his change a 20 pence piece worth about $11,400 (£7,000). (Daily Telegraph)


• Wiener Winner- New York's Joey Chestnut retained his title in the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest with a personal best of 68 hot dogs. (UPI)


• Buddy, Can You Bear a Sub? - A New Jersey man claims that a bear attacked him for his Italian sandwich. The animal probably got lost and thought it was in Manhattan, where no one would have blinked. (AP)


• Cheesy Wedding - A woman who is a professional cheese sculptor married a retired Navy commander that she met while working on a cheese version of a U.S. air craft carrier.(UPI)


• Maybe More Grill Time, Less Air Time? - Gordon Ramsey's restaurants saw profits fall by about 90 percent. (Daily Telegraph)


• Hot, Cold, or Embalmed?- A Canadian funeral home offers free coffee at a drive-through window. Please tell me that they don't take burial orders at the same time. (UPI)


• Pez Sues For Pause - Pez Candy, maker of the eponymous candy and dispensers is suing the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia in California for infringing its trademark with a giant model Pez dispenser. (Courthouse News Service)


• Field of Diets - A Chicago Cubs fan says that he's going on a 500-calorie-a-day diet until the team can win five games in a row. (Chicago Sun-Times)


• Don't Touch That Grill - The city of Highland Park, Michigan, in its wisdom, outlawed outdoor barbecuing or grilling. (UPI)


• McDonald's Comes to Stop for Bicyclists - A McDonald's in the UK refused to serve a couple of bicyclists on a tandem bike at its drive-through window because of the potential danger to them by cars. What about the danger from what's inside the sack?(Daily Telegraph)


• Bug Weight Loss - Apparently, someone studied whether cockroaches would get fat on fast food. (They do.) (LiveScience.com)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Orange Violence - A Tennessee couple has been accused of a fight that escalated into assault by Cheetos. (AP)


• When Chips Are Down - A former FDA head, whose book argues that people are addicted to sweets, apparently once found himself in thrall to a pair of chocolate chip cookies. Clearly he was outnumbered. (Crispy On The Outside)


• Strawberry Brat Spat - There will be three different purveyors of strawberry-flavored bratwurst at the Cedarburg Strawberry Festival in Wisconsin. (UPI)


• Can 'O 'Possum - A baby opossum managed to get itself stuck in a soda machine at a gym in upstate New York. Police were stymied until a worker came with a key to the front panel. Did anyone try some change? (AP)


• Must Have Been Thirsty - A couple of would-be New Zealand liquor store robbers changed their mind mid-stick up and settled for a beer from a customer's six-pack instead. (UPI)


• New Kind Of Ice - Scientists have created the final fifteenth predicted form of ice. Maybe they didn't have a fridge nearby? (Technology Review)


• Chili Grenade - Security forces in India are developing a grenade powered by the searing "ghost chili" to incapacitate people. (Reuters)


• Shops Find Eel Supplies Slippery - Shops in the U.K. that sell a traditional meal called eel, pie, and mash are finding that a fishing ban is making the requisite jellied eel tough to find. (Daily Telegraph)


• Does It Include Tip? - A Chinese investment fund manager paid $2.1 million in a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffet. (AP)


• Look For The Ketchup - Canadian police are looking for a man who ran naked past a fast food restuarant and snagged a woman's fries in the process. (Reuters)


• Grocery Sale Or Else - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin dropped by a grocery store in Moscow without warning and started telling managers to lower their prices. (AFP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Criminal, Drawn and Buttered - A man accused of breaking into a Maine restaurant, eating 11 lobsters, and washing them down with a white wine, after which he left the fridge open, cause $1,000 in damage, was found on a bench in a presumably post-prandial nap. (AP)


• Drinks for Insults - A Spanish bar offers a free drink to patrons who can insult the staff in particularly clever ways. (UPI)


• Prosecutor Looking for Fast Food Toy Ban - A prosecutor in Brazil is asking a court to ban toys included with kids fast food meals because they help children develop bad eating habits. (Reuters)


• Step Away From the Bologna - An Oklahoma man claims that he was assaulted over his bologna and cheese sandwich. Maybe the person was incensed when he saw the victim adding mayonnaise to the snack. (AP)


• Banning the "Devil's Vegetable" - A British navy captain has banned Brussels sprouts from his ship because he hates what he calls the devil's vegetable. He claims that avoiding mass flatulence has nothing to do with his decision. (AFP)


• Man Finds Jesus In Coffee - Some people seem to worship their coffee. A New York man found the image of Jesus, less than an inch across, on the inside of his mug.(UPI)


• Will Steal For Prison Food - A homeless man in Taiwan had stolen a pair of shoes and was kept in jail overnight. The police station apparently is prepared to give a meal to someone down and out. (Reuters)


• Who Needs an Opener? - A martial artists poked his way into the Malaysian Book of Records by piercing four coconuts with his index finger in just under 31 seconds. (AFP)


• Food for Dad from Church - The Church of England, concerned about fathers not attending mass, celebrated Fathers' Day by serving beer, bacon rolls, and chocolate. (Daily Telegraph)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Worse Than Burger Breath Burger King has released a new men's cologne called Flame. The front of this affront to taste (in more ways than one) is a host of the show Britain's Got Talent. Can we vote this off of store shelves? (Daily Mail Online)


• Coupon Madness Few things are more dangerous than too much success. A San Francisco coop market learned that after placing into local phone books a coupon for 20 percent off on Wednesdays and Thursdays, which have become days that patrons wait to get a parking spot and then face very long lines. (UPI


• John Belushi Would Have Been Proud So far in June there have been at least two food fights in U.S. schools that have resulted in police interventions and arrests -- one in New York City and another in Portage, Wis. (UPI, AP)


• Yellow Lobster From the equal-time-for-other-primary-colors we have what may be a rare yellow lobster having been caught off Prince Edward Island and now on display in the tank of a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. But her claws aren't bound (much to the dismay of the other lobsters in the tank) and she's fed sushi-grade tuna. (Boston Globe)


• No Coke For You Venezuela has banned Coke Zero as a danger to health. Regular Coke apparently remains healthy. (Reuters)


• And No Free Beer, Either Molson has suddenly changed its policy of giving its retired workers free beer. The roughly US$900,000 was apparently too much of a sudsidy for the company to pay. (Reuters)


• It's OK, It's After Memorial Day A crowd of 5,000 appeared dressed in white and invaded a square at the bottom of the Champs Elysees in Paris, set up tables and chairs, and had a sit-down meal. Where are the parking valets when you need them? (AFP)


• Meating Fashion A teenager made a dress out of real salami and bacon for an Aqua Teen Hunger Force birthday party. Well, there's one course taken care of. (Crispy on the Outside)


• A Really Hot Dish A traveler from Mumbai en route to Frankfurt had to return because a package of curry powder in his checked in luggage set off smoke and fire alarms when some of the spice mix escaped its packaging. (AFP)

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• Frozen Pizza A pizza parlor employee forgot to turn the heat off one night, so the owner turned off the heat, period, and threatened to fire any employee who complained. The manager won't - she's married to the owner and gets her own space heater. (KING-TV)


• Cheesy Vacation In an apparently different pizza climate, 54 current and former employees who saved $115,000 in tips over 13 years are taking a week-long tropical vacation. (AP)


• Big Bean Country The leading coffee-producing countries. (The Economist)


• Lamb Rashers A new development in bacon, from our friends at Crispy on the Outside, who follow the subject with obsessive care, is lamb bacon. (Crispy on the Outside)


• Chipped Business Waterford Wedgwood goes into receivership. (The New York Times)


• Head (En)case To avoid a new helmet law, many motorbike-riding Nigerians are tying things like dried fruit shells to their heads. (Reuters)


• Lotsa Latte Chicago public schools spent $67,000 on espresso machines for a culinary arts program, but largely haven't used them. Would Starbucks gift cards have been cheaper? (AP)


• Swallow that Gum To avoid the roughly 70 pieces of discarded chewing gum per square meter of sidewalk space (which seems too large to be believable), the Mexican government is now telling people to swallow their wads. (AP)


• Lobster Liberty An aged lobster - conventionally clocked at 80 years and a full 20 pounds - avoided ending up on a plate when a New York restaurant gave it a reprieve. (AP)


• Unhappy Hour Depressed consumers are still drinking, only at home or during happy hours. (Consumerist)


• Burrito Betrothal A couple gets married at a Taco Bell. (UPI)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Cracker Cash Proving that snacking can be rewarding, a California couple found $10,000 in a box of crackers. (AP)


• Brain Busted Supermarkets know a whole lot more about how you shop than you might like. (The Economist)


• Decaf Detection A new product lets you test whether the coffee you're drinking is decaf or hitest. (MedGadget)


• Somewhere Over the Rainbow Manhattan's famous Rainbow Room has closed. (AP)


• God Made Her Do It A New York judge ruled that religious duty doesn't excuse smuggling monkey meat into the country. (AP)


• Now That's a Pour Someone built a device to achieve the perfect beer pour. Does it drink, as well? (Engadget)


• Top Tuna Two sushi bar owners in Japan paid more than $100,000, or $370 a pound, for a blue fin tuna. (AP)


• Big Bread A 22,000 pound bread was part of the Magi celebration in Mexico. (AFP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Soda Subsidy New York's governor proposed a 15 percent "obeisity tax" on non-diet sodas. (New York Daily News via Crispy on the Outside)


• Food Fight For the second time in a month, a Florida man was arrested in part for throwing food at his girlfriend. (AP)


• Apple Apples A Japanese farmer puts stickers on some of his apples so they grow with Apple logos or iPod outlines. (CNET)


• Lotsa Latkes In Hanukkah news, a student ate 46 latkes - or seven pounds - to win an eating contest on Long Island. (AP)


• Legal Sweet Tooth A lawyer gets arrested for feeding a piece of candy to his shackled client in court. (AP)


• Burger Body Bath Burger King has a men's body spray that makes the wearer smell "like flame-broiled meat." Eww. (Crispy on the Outside)


• Cut-Rate Caviar Police in Milan seized 88 lbs. of smuggled caviar and are giving it to the poor. Wonder if they're also providing the blinis. (Reuters)

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• Drinkable Art A start-up prints images in caramel on latte foam. (Boston Globe)


• Kentucky Kleaning Some KFC workers got into trouble for bathing in sinks used for cleaning dishes. Hey, at least they were clean when working. (AP)


• Better than a Gallic Shrug A French literature major, having worked as a grocery store checkout clerk, has parlayed the experience into a best-selling memoir in France. (Washington Post)


• Power of Pepperoni A pizza delivery man, finding himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel, fought back with a hot pepperoni pizza (AP)


• Don't Ask About the Hole A man working without pants at a drive-through doughnut shop gets probation. (AP)


• China Gets First Michelin Star Of course, the obvious line would be that an hour later the restaurant in question would want another one. (Financial Times)

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• Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime (Or Ten) New Yorkers are tipping less, and that's tough on the restaurant crowd. (New York Magazine)


• Drink and Watch Someone has come out with a combination beer tap and LCD television. All it needs is a fridge. (Engadget)


• Double Points for Side Dish Cooking titles (you can fillet a fish on one, oh joy, or rapture) are popping out for game consoles. (Washington Post)


• Soup and Shawl A temporary Manhattan store selling independent designer lines is also serving soup. (AP)


• Free Market Coffee A libertarian, barrista, and contributor to Crispy on the Outside considers the economic and aesthetic implications of Starbucks. (Doublethink Online)


• One Hump or Two? Australians are being told to eat camels to stop global warming. No, I can't make this up. (AFP)


• Did You Check Your Pockets? The Moroccan subsidiary of McDonald's had to apologize for distributing maps, as part of a Happy Meal, that didn't show Western Sahara. (AFP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Bootleg Russian Vodka The economy is hitting Russia hard, and many hard-drinking Russians are having to forgo commercial vodka, sometimes substituting dangerous homemade brew. (Reuters)


• Zero-G Coffee Cup An astronaut has developed a cup for drinking coffee in zero gravity - good for when you're orbiting the planet, or in the middle of a very steep drop in your car. (Space.com)


• Take the Coffee to Go Cafes are closing at a rate of two a day in France. (NYT)


• Foul Fiend Flailed with Frozen Fowl An alleged carjacker was stopped from stealing a woman's car when another shopper clubbed him with a frozen turkey. (AP)


• Patent Pending Panini McDonald's is apparently trying to patent a way of making sandwiches. Ingredients held between two slices of bread - who would have thought it? (Slashdot.org)


• Fierce Flatulence A 13-year-old Florida student was arrested for disrupting his classroom by turning off the computers of other students and by passing gas. (AP)


• Sweet Jesus German church authorities are reacting negatively to a man who's making a business of casting chocolate versions of the baby Jesus, wrapped in gold foil. (Reuters)


• Online Food Forensics An Australian restaurant owner tracked down five young people who ordered a large meal and then skipped out on the bill by finding them on Facebook. (Reuters)


• Plummeting Pumpkins Hundreds of people on Long Island, NY paid $9 each to several hundred pumpkins being tossed from a second floor to splatter on the ground below. (AP)


• Thanksgiving Theft A thief stole the entire Thanksgiving dinner from the porch of a Wisconsin family. (AP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• A Pizza Too Far A video of someone's chocolate-covered bacon candy pizza. What more can you say? (Crispy on the Outside)


• TV Pizza Staying on the theme of places that pizza should not go, you can order a Domino's pie on your TiVO. (Silicon Alley Insider)


• Special Samosas A couple visiting India paid over $200 for four samosas. The shop owner explained away the price claiming that the fritters had "special" herbs that acted as aphrodisiacs. (Reuters)


• Two, Please Canada's Supreme Court upheld that obese people have a right to two seats on domestic flights. Do they also get seconds on the meal? (Reuters)


• Tons of Kimchi Thousands of volunteers in Seoul made 143 tons of kimchi in a bid for a world record. Unfortunately, the Guinness Book of World Records doesn't have an appropriate category. (AP)


• Meat Police Framingham, MA police don't know why someone is leaving top quality cuts of meat on the town commons. (AP)


• Revealing Phone A McDonald's patron in Arkansas left his cell phone behind him after a trip, clearly forgetting that he had nude photos of his wife on it. (AP)


• Whatchamacall It? Restaurants are considering alternatives to the term "restaurant" because it apparently causes already budget-minded consumers to tighten their purses even more. (Financial Times)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Wash Hands After Eating Greasy fingerprints on an orange juice bottle left at the scene of a break-in helped lead police to the culprit. (AP)


• Mexican Giant Bread of Death It's actually what it says. Ten feet of bread is a whole lot for $137. (Crispy on the Outside)


• Bake Sale Police The government push for healthier foods is threatening the existence of the school bake sale. (New York Times)


• That Tastes Like ... Oh. It Is. NASA is using a water recycling system, to purify urine into potable water, to handle larger crews on the international space station. (Reuters)


• Pumpkin Seed Aphrodisiac? An Austrian covered pumpkin seeds in chocolate, but then colored them blue and named them Styriagra. Now Pfizer is suing, saying that he's trying to make them look like little, blue Viagra pills. (AFP)


• Too Big for Prison to Hold A 490 pound gang member got sprung from a Canadian prison because he was too large for his cell. (Reuters)


• Food Records Feature On the fourth-annual Guinness World Records Day, food played an important part in a number of new records, such as the largest tea bag (hopefully inspiring the largest tea cup), and the fastest time to peel and eat a kiwi fruit (16.15 secionds). (AFP)


• EU Permits Wonky Fruit, Veggies The European Union, in its bureaucratic wisdom, has decided that bent cucumbers and other malformed fruits and vegetables may be sold in markets. (AFP)


• Tequila as Precious Jewels Researchers have reportedly found a way to turn tequila into diamonds. (The Guardian)


• Nestlé Pans Soda Nestlé has started anti-soda marketing to help increase sales on its bottled water brand as people, hit by the financial crisis, turn to tap. And then you can have a chocolate chaser to help keep the weight off. (Wall Street Journal)

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• Bloodhounds Follow Pork Swiss police, acting on reports from motorists, had bloodhounds follow a long trail of blood that turned out to be a butcher's van with an overturned barrel of pork headed to a sausage factory (AP)


• Workers Unite at Your Fridges A U.K. nonprofit is urging people not to buy sandwiches at work but to bring leftovers from the previous night's dinner. (Daily Mail)


• They Have Expensive Tastes Chef Jamie Oliver, who really should stop making social pronouncements, claims that Britons don't know how to cook inexpensively at home, so aren't ready for an economic downturn. (Reuters)


• Soup for Spot Berlin has a soup kitchen intended strictly for dogs. (Reuters)


• But the Flavor Lasts so Long A man tried to pay his bar tab with chewing gum wrappers. (AP)


• All Hail Spud It's the international year of the potato. Have a Yukon Gold to lunch. (AFP)


• Mushrooming Music A Swiss researcher claims that he has duplicated the sound of a Stradivarious violin by treating a replica with mushrooms. (AFP)

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• Taco With Weed A Colorado couple found that their take-out Tex-Mex food order included a bag of marijuana. (AP)


• Charm of Coffee Researchers say that even holding a cup of hot coffee can can warm the heart and not just the hands. (Reuters)


• Barkeep, a Two-Thirds, Please The U.K. is considering a measure that would allow bars to sell two-third pint glasses instead of only a full or half pint for those times when the one is too much and the other not enough. (Reuters)


• Turn Back the Clock and Prices A Manhattan restuarant hit its 100th anniversary and for the day set dishes back to 1908 prices. (AFP)


• Fat and Glad-iator It seems that Roman gladiators fattened up on carbs. (Crispy on the Outside)

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• Forget Stocks - Try Barrels The stock market may be taking a beating, but the World Whiskey Index has seen an average return of 26.2 percent over the last 11 months. That's putting your money where your mouth is. (Reuters)


• Use the Tape Faster Next Time A group of Iranians built what they hoped would be the world's largest sandwich, but before representatives of the Guiness Book of World Records could measure it, bystanders rushed in and ate the evidence. (Reuters)


• Burger with Everything - Literally A man took well over four hours to eat a 15 pound burger that, with toppings and all, topped out at 20.2 pounds. (AP)


• Not the Nuts - Police have warned thieves that stole 660 pounds of hazelnuts not to eat them because the sacks they're in are filled with a poisonous gas to extend the shelf life and they need additional treatment to be safe to eat. (Reuters)


• Don't Drink the Stew - About 170 wedding guests in northern China were rushed to the hospital after someone decided to flavor a pot of stew with powdered rust remover, mistaking it for salt. (Reuters)

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• A Slice or 45 Competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut just won a pizza eating contest, downing 45 slices in 10 minutes. That's even more than a teenage boy. (AP)


• Assault by Cake A Hartford, CT woman was charged with assault and various other activities for allegedly serving a pot-spiked gingercake to her real estate agent. Maybe she wanted a higher price? (AP)


• To Choose, Look Down The tabletops of an upscale London restaurant are giant touch-screen displays that let you see the food and then order it. (Evening Standard)


• Bad Wine? Wait 30 Minutes An inventor has found a way to "age" wine in under an hour using ultrasound. (London Telegraph)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Food Stars at Ig Nobel One of the winners of this year's Ig Nobel Awards, an honoring of real but weird research, was someone who showed that Coca-Cola was a good spermicide and that people will enjoy stale potato chips so long as they crunch loudly enough. (Reuters)


• End of Free Naked Lunch A Maine restaurant had been offering a free lunch to people who would jump naked into a nearby lake (probably setting their teeth chattering so much that they wouldn't be able to eat), but has dropped the promotion when the town offered to drop his liquor permit. (AP)


• It's Good for You A zoo in central China has been feeding chicken soup to its pandas. And what of the matzo balls? (AP)


• Hair of the Horse A man in Kazakhstan beat a drunken-driving rap because he had consumed fermented mare's milk, not beer or liquor. (AP)


• Ballsy Cooking A Serbian chef has come out with a cookbook focused on recipes using testicles as an ingredient. (AFP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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• Take Out for Locked In Egyptian prisoners are being allowed to order delivered food. (Reuters)


• Farm Portrait An Ohio farmer, who regularly cuts a corn maze into his field (a big fall activity for those of us living in rural areas) this year had it designed to look like a portrait of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. (AP)


• What's in a Wine Name? In another politically tinged story, a small winery in Chile has a wine that was called Palin before the governor of Alaska became so prominent, but has found that sales are off. If only it had been beer. (AP)


• Mom's Milk Ice Cream As a publicity stunt (and a pretty good one), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which opposed commercial milk production, called on Ben and Jerry's to make an ice cream out of human milk. (AP)


• Pickle Piccolo? A ten year old group plays music on instruments made of vegetables. (AFP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

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