Posted on 27 Dec, 2011 -
20 million bats and the world’s biggest baby
Just a quickie from me to wish you ongoing Christmas cheer
Plus: 10 truly mad stories from a crazy book I got in my stocking this year!
Dear Reader,
Writing this quick email to you has made a very nice excuse for me to slip away from the family mayhem downstairs for half an hour.
The girls are playing Yahtzee with their Nana while my husband fixes us some kind of lunch involving turkey.
Me? I’m wearing a new pair of cosey slippers, burning a new fragrant candle and flicking through the copy of Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not!’ that one of my crazy aunts bought me.
Well, it’s fascinating to know that while most of us sit here in our very everyday lives, some people out there in the world are doing some REALLY CRAZY things.
Here are some of my favourite crazy facts and stories I’ve found so far (where DO they get the ideas from??!!):
A man in New York once walked more than 80 miles around a track with a full milk bottle on his head.
S.C. Naganandaswamy of Karnataka of India can float in 6 metres of water for 22 hours continuously without moving any limbs.
The most expensive toy car ever made costs a cool $2 million. The Bugatti Veyron Diamon is made from solid 24-carat gold and platinum and has a huge diamond on the front grille. It was created by a jewellery designer from Liverpool and a Swiss model expert and is almost twice as expensive as a real Bugatti Veyron.
Watch out when you’re taking down the Christmas tree: When surgeons operated on a Russian man who had been complaining of chest pains and coughing up blood, they found a 5-cm long piece of spruce tree inside his lung which he must have inhaled.
“Scientists can determine the ages of people born after 1943 to within 18 months by examining the amount of radioactive carbon in their teeth, caused by above-ground nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s.”
I thought my childbirths were hard but how about this: A baby was born in Hunan Province in China weighing 44 lb - which is about the same as my 6-year-old daughter!
Or just imagine having to visit the cave in San Antonio, Texas which is home to some 20 million bats who eat more than 100 tonnes of insects every night!
There is a fungi that lives on animal dung which - despite being just 1 cm tall themselves - can shoot packets of spores up to 6 ft in the air to reproduce.
Health and Safety gone MAD: After living in a 7-ft wide cave for 16 years, Hilaire Purbrick of Brighton was evicted by officials in 2009 because his underground home didn’t have a second fire exit…
And finally, something I just didn’t know could happen: In 1943, a volcano appeared in a Mexican cornfield. Just a week later, Volcano Paricutin had grown to the size of a five-storey building. A year later it stood at 336 metres.
Go Google!
Right, I’m being called back down. My peace is up, apparently!
I hope you’re having a really great Christmas and hopefully getting more rest than me!
Best wishes
