Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Giant cabbage, 5ft in width and 80lb in weigh

Let's hope the neighbours like cabbage. Amateur gardener Jimmy Hill is promising to share his crop with them and, judging by this picture, there's a lot to go round.

Mr Hill, 53, has grown a row of the monster vegetables, the biggest of which is 5ft across and will weigh 80lb when it's ready to cut.

Mechanic Mr Hill also grows onions, carrots and cucumbers in the rear garden of his home in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.


It is not his first bumper crop and in previous years he and wife Jackie, 51, have run out of ideas about how to eat them.

'I like them and my wife is a wonderful cook but I have to admit there are only so many ways you can cook them, so I reckon we'll give them away to neighbours.

'People say I should enter shows but for me it's just a hobby.'

Saturday, September 18, 2010

World's biggest chocolate bar in ... Armenia! .....224in long, 110in wide and 10in thick.

When one thinks of the world centres in the art of chocolate-making the countries that spring to mind are Belgium and Switzerland.

But Armenia?

The tiny country sandwiched between Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and Georgia has just produced the world's biggest chocolate bar.


The Grand Candy factory in Yerevan, the capital of the former republic of the Soviet Union, has just unveiled the 9,702lb monster.

Guinness World Record's representative Elizabeth Smith presented the factory owner Karen Vardanyan with an official certificate during a ceremony today.


She said she was glad to witness what she described as an 'incredible event'.
Ms Vardanyan said that the chocolate bar was produced to mark the tenth anniversary of the company. The previous record was set in Italy in 2007.

The bar, containing cocoa beans from Ghana, is 224in long, 110in wide and 10in thick.


It will be divided up and handed out to members of the public next month.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The loneliest child..she couldn't afford to have friends. Find out why?

Little Bea Todd is unable to play with other children because her immune system is so weak she could die if she catches a cold.

Bea was born with a severe immune system deficiency which means she has to be kept away from other children her age.  She has to avoid playgrounds and birthday parties because her body is so weak that she would be unable to fight off a common cold.

The three-year-old has spent most of her young life in hospital but was allowed home in February following a bone marrow transplant.

Now a charity has built her her own special playground in the family's Norfolk back garden to raise Bea's spirits.


Her mother Anna Todd, 33, said: 'To have a playground in the back garden is great. Now she can go out and play whenever she wants.  She's out there everyday without fail even making it to the top of the climbing wall. It's incredible to think she couldn't even walk back in February. '

Anna, a former textile conservator at National Trust, said it had been 'heartbreaking' to watch her daughter staring at other children playing at her local park.

She said: 'I used to drive her up to the local playground and if it was busy and there were children playing I'd have to turn around and go home.

'She would see other kids and say "Oh dear Mummy, we can't go today there are too many children". It was heartbreaking.

'Her immune system is so fragile and low she can pick up anything quicker and easier and her body does not have the strength to fight them.


'We cannot afford to let her play with any kids we don't know. If they have a cough, a virus or chicken pox - these things could be life-threatening.

'We can't go swimming, toddler groups or nursery. She can't even go to other kid's birthday parties or have children here at home.'

Bea was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis and HRH hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis after suffering a rash when she was five months old.

She spent several days in intensive care at West Suffolk Hospital, in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and a further six months in hospital.

Bea underwent a bone marrow transplant at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital when she was aged just two-years-old. She then braved chemotherapy and spent two weeks in intensive care before living for four months on an isolation ward.

Bea was allowed home in February but needs a Hickman Line and tube in her nose to administer medication and has platelet transfusions every two days.

The treatment she has undergone has been so intensive that her immune system has been left too weak to defend itself.

Anna and Bea's father Chris Peck, 34, who works as a telecoms consultant, have to keep their house spotless.


The couple, who plan to marry, clean the house from top to bottom every two days and hoover each morning to keep the germs away.  They only allow relatives children if they have been screened for any health problems and illnesses.

Anna added: 'We have learned to live with it otherwise we would go mad. We watch her very carefully and take every precaution.

'She's used to not spending time with other children and become fairly imaginative and very good on her own.

'To have a playground in the back garden is great. Now she can go out and play whenever she wants.  She's out there everyday without fail even making it to the top of the climbing wall. It's incredible to think she couldn't even walk back in February.

'We keep telling ourselves its not going to be like this forever. We are getting through the complications and we really hope to send her to school next year.'

Saturday, September 4, 2010

The world's largest drawing, with the size of 4,469 Wembley football pitches..etched on the surface of Lake Baikal

This spectacular artwork is the world's largest drawing and at 12.5 square miles it would be able to find room for 4,469 Wembley football pitches.

Etched onto the surface of Lake Baikal, in Russia's windswept and frozen Siberia, it was created by land artist extraordinaire Jim Denevan and his team in March of this year.

Commissioned by clothing firm Anthropologie to create the work for their advertising tie-in series The Anthropologist, Jim, 49, spent 15 days on the surface of Lake Baikal completing the drawing.


Using the frozen black ice beneath the white snow as a canvas, Jim and his team lived in a native tent, or 'yurt' which was set up on the frozen ice surface.

Drawn using snow ploughs for the enormous circular lines and shovels for the smallest 18-inch circumference lines, Jim set his pattern using a mathematical Fibonacci curve which contains over one thousand separate circles.

Jim 'drew' his creation before the team begun using a simple bike and stick, which he rode around lining his artwork into the snow.

“This is the largest drawing in the world and beats my previous record which was a sand drawing in the desert of Nevada, which had a circumference of nine miles,' said California resident Jim.


'This drawing is almost ten percent bigger than that, but was designed differently to take into account the shore line of the lake.'

'The circle to the right on the Fibonacci curve holds the same dimensions as my Nevada drawing, but of course it is not a total circle because of the lake's geography.'

Travelling to Khuzhir on Olkhon island in the middle of Lake Baikal in March, Jim set out to draw his latest record breaking creation.


'We originally wanted to go to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to do this drawing, but after some research I realised that this part of Lake Baikal behaved similarly to the deserts I was used to,' said Jim.

'They usually experience a prolonged period of low pressure over the lake, which means that even though the temperatures are generally around five or ten below zero, it doesn't snow.'

'That meant that we could part the snow on top of the lake ice and create the drawing without interruptions.'

Of course nothing went quite as smoothly as planned.

'The process begins with me riding around the lake on my bike with a stick,' said Jim.


'That allows me to draw the outline using both the wheels and the stick to push away the snow.'

'However, after around the fifth day when we were just getting to work with the larger snow ploughs it snowed.'

'This covered up all my previous outlines and we had to work hard to see where they were to make sure we were on the right tracks.'



Braving the chill Siberian climate and driving the snowplough around on top of the four and half feet thick ice, Jim and his team salvaged the project.

'However, on the ninth day, we experienced a storm, which blew the snow back on top of the lines we had created, some of which were eight feet wide,' said Jim.

'That was disheartening to say the least.'   Tirelessly working through day and night, Jim and his team had completed their work by the 15th day.


'This is an iconic setting for such a surreal and beautiful work, even if it only lasted for just over a month before it disappeared,' explained Jim.

"Lake Baikal contains up to 20 percent of the world's fresh water and is also in remote and mysterious Siberia.

'Battling the cold and the wind and the logistical problems was exhausting, but this is a beautiful work and one I am very proud of.'

Friday, September 3, 2010

Steve Wozniak, first person in the world to catch 1,000 different species of fish. Look at his collection of pictures! Awesome!

An angler has broken the ultimate fishing record by becoming the first person in the world to catch 1,000 different species of fish.

Californian Steve Wozniak, 47, has spent 10 years pursuing the astonishing quest that has seen him fish in 63 different countries.

He has spent 20,000 hours on riverbanks, piers, beaches and boats waiting for a nibble from fish ranging from a tiny minnow to a 900lb shark.


Steve has forked out more than £50,000 and racked up over one million air miles criss-crossing the globe with his rod and tackle over the last decade.

The record rodman has fished on every continent bar Antarctica, including places as far flung as Cambodia and the exotic Isle of Wight.

He has snared virtually every freshwater fish native to Britain and
spent two years and 4,000 pounds alone trying to capture an Atlantic salmon in Scotland.

Steve has also broken 12 International Game Fishing Association records along the way and has another five pending.

His mammoth efforts finally paid off when he snared a 2lb coalfish in a Norwegian fjord to net the record,that is being dubbed the Cast of a Thousand.


Steve now intends to temporarily hang up his rod to write a book about his angling adventures.

He said: 'It is very humbling to be the only person in the world to catch 1,000 different species of fish.'

'It has been an almighty challenge and one where there have been many highs and many lows, like trying to catch a tench fish which seemed to elude me for seven years.'


'When I caught the coalfish I think I expected it to be this big fanfare event but I was sat in a boat in a peaceful fjord an hour below the Arctic circle.'

'I just sort of sat there with a glow of accomplishment.'

Steve caught his first fish at the age of five and by the time he was in his mid-30s he reckoned he had netted nearly 150 different species.'


He said: 'The 1,000 record started as a testosterone-driven competition between myself and a friend over who had caught the most fish species.

'That started me thinking of the idea that getting 1,000 would be a fantastic and worthy goal to achieve.'

Steve, a manager at a software company but not to be confused with the Apple co-founder, frequently travels around the world for his job and broke off from business to go both sea and coarse angling whenever he could.


In 2006 he took a year off work to concentrate on fishing and netted 180 species in that year alone, taking his total up to 676.

Over the last three years the numbers gradually increased by an average of over 100 a year, culminating in the momentous coalfish catch.

Steve said that
his deadliest catches using that trusty rod and line were the 10ft mako shark - which have been known to kill humans - and a stonefish, the most venomous fish in the world, which he caught off Cairns, Australia.

He has also reeled in 33 different shark species, four different species of piranha, a deadly lionfish and 14 varieties of puffer fish - the second-most poisonous vertebrate in the world after the poison dart frog.


He has been badly injured four times in his mission; once when he trod on the barbed spine of a turkey fish in Hawaii and then when his left thumb was gnawed to the bone by a spiny dogfish.

His hands ended up bleeding profusely after he spent five hours reeling in a giant 200lbs tuna fish off Mexico and on another occasion a hook ripped into his middle finger during a tussle with a harmless trout in Germany.

He has caught many fish native to British waterways including pike, perch, chub, barbel, grayling, trout, salmon, bream, gudgeon, dace, bleak, carp, tench, roach and rudd.

Steve, who has thrown 90 per cent of his catch back into the water alive, has also caught a pollock and a wrasse in the sea off the Isle of Wight.


His smallest catch was a tiny minnow measuring a little over an inch which he plucked out of the River Thames at Marlow, Bucks.

Steve, whose partner Marta often goes fishing with him, said: 'I have been very fortunate that my work has allowed me to travel all over the world so I have been able to go fishing on days or weekends off.'

'But I have spent an awful lot of my own time and money personally chasing this goal.'


'Some of the big game fish have been really great and exciting, like blue marlin in Hawaii, black marlin in Australia and swordfish in Florida.'

'Then there have been a couple of fish that have been really tough to catch'.

'I spent a good two years and a few thousand pounds chasing after an Atlantic salmon which I eventually caught in Northern Ireland.'


Steve, from San Ramon, California, said he hopes to one day reach 2,000 different species of fish and will travel to new countries to achieve the goal.

He said: 'There are just so many wild and crazy different things out there.'

'I may have caught more species than anybody else but look how many that I haven't caught; there are more than 31,400 species out there.'
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