Every child has written their names on the beach at some point. But whereas most people's 'sandwriting' is washed away, one super-rich Arab sheikh has ensured that his doodles will last a little longer.
Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Ahyan, 63, has scrawled his name in sand on an island he owns with letters so big they can be seen from space.The sheikh is president of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and boasts a personal fortune second only to the Saudi king's.
Making a sand: A satellite image from space shows the enormous letters of the name 'HAMAD' carved into the sand on Al futaysi island in Abu Dhabi. Beach life: The sea runs into the H, A and part of the M in the name of super-rich 63-year-old Arab sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Ahyan.
The word 'HAMAD' measures 1,000 metres high and is a staggering two miles long from the 'H' to the 'D' on the Al Futaisi island.And rather than allow the writing to be washed away by the ocean, the letters actually form waterways that absorb the encroaching tide.The ruler's name is even visible on Google's map service.
Google Maps - Type "Al futaysi island in Abu Dhabi".
This is one of the most bizzarre moment where a helicopter is lifting an airplane. Helicopters are very much easily movable than airplanes. If an airplane is stucked with some technical problems and land up in a field or some other public area, this could be the only way to take it back to the garage!
This seems unbelieveable though!
01. Singapore
In a bid to keep the streets of this super-efficient city clean, the authorities in Singapore decided in 1992 to ban chewing gum completely. Stick to a mint. 09 More after the break...
02. Eraclea, Italy
Many holidaymakers head to the sandy beach at Eraclea to escape the hordes of tourists in nearby Venice. Unfortunately, those who enjoy building sandcastles can think again – it’s forbidden.
03. Amsterdam, Netherlands
A curious loophole in the law means that smoking tobacco in a public place such as a coffee shop in Amsterdam is banned, while puffing away on pure cannabis is entirely legal.
04. South-East Asia
The durian, a fruit native to Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, has a smell so incredibly strong that it is banned from many public places in South-East Asia.
05. Florida, USA
For those who are young, free and single and enjoy jumping out of planes in their spare time, be careful if you’re in Florida – unmarried women who parachute on Sundays can be jailed.
06. Switzerland
Bizarrely, flushing the toilet in a Swiss apartment is illegal after 10pm. It is also against the law for a man to relieve himself while standing up after 10pm.
07. Eboli, Italy
Honeymooners might be best to avoid hiring a car in Eboli, just south of Naples. Kissing in a moving vehicle here can carry a fine of up to €500.
08. Capri, Italy
Locals in Capri, northern Italy, must value their peace and quiet – a couple were arrested recently for wearing excessively noisy flip-flops, following the introduction of a ban on ‘noisy footwear’.
09. Alabama, USA
The Southern American state has a quite superfluous law in place which states that it’s illegal to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle.
10. Dubai, UAE
Dubai’s luxurious resorts and stunning beaches may seem like the ideal place to spend a romantic holiday, but don’t get too affectionate – kissing in public here is illegal, and many tourists have fallen foul of this law in recent years.
The Mona Lisa, one of the world's most famous paintings, has been recreated with 3,604 cups of coffee - and 564 pints of milk.
The different colours were created by adding no, little or lots of milk to each cup of black coffee. It measures an impressive 20 feet high and 13 feet wide and took a team of eight people three hours to complete.
It was created for The Rocks Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia, and seen by 130,000 people who attended the one-day coffee-lovers event.
Elaine Kelly, from event organizers the Sydney Harbor Foreshore Authority, was delighted with the result. She said: "Each coffee cup was filled with varying amounts of milk to create the different sepia shades of the painting."
Painter Chris Trueman, from Claremont, California, has created a unique painting by using 200,000 dead ants instead of paint.
The painting Chris calls “Self Portrait With a Gun” actually features his younger brother, dressed as a cowboy, holding his dad’s rifle. From afar this unusual artwork looks more like an old yellowed photo, but as you approach it, you realize it’s actually something completely different – a painting made of ants.
To the artist, this bizarre ant painting represents how humans learn about things abstractly, only to have their impressions changed as they get closer to them. But actually completing his masterpiece wasn’t the simplest task, mostly because he hated killing the creatures he perceives to be ” right on the line of what I consider intelligent life.” When he first began the project, he decided to catch the ants himself, but the ants in San Francisco, where he was living at the time, were too small. So he decided to order them online, from a guy who was breeding and selling them as food for lizards.
First he ordered just 1,000 ants, because he didn’t know how many he would need for the right density, but then he started ordering 40,000. They came in peanut-butter jars, and seeing them moving around in there, it was hard for Chris to make a decision. He couldn’t release them, because they weren’t native to that area, and they could start biting people. So he decided to kill the ants himself. It wasn’t easy, and he even took a 1-year-break, but decided to complete his ant masterpiece, because he didn’t want the first batch to have died in vain.
Some of the ants dried up and were torn to pieces, so Chris Trueman used them in the large parts of the painting, where details weren’t important, saving the full-sized ants for the detailed parts. he would handle them with tweezers, placing them on the Plexiglass canvas and coat them in a painting resin called galkyd.
Chris Trueman‘s ant painting is on display, at an art gallery in San Diego, and is priced at $35,000.
A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a story by NPR's Planet Money team about "Toxie" a toxic asset they had purchased to follow and help tell the story of the recent financial meltdown. One of the mortgages in Toxie was on a home bought for investment in Bradenton, Florida, and the team took a look at housing in the area. Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were "enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years". Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida.
Three mice are sitting around drinking and boasting about their strengths. The first mouse says "Mouse traps, Ha! I do pushups with the bar". The second mouse pulls a pill from his pocket, swallows it, and says with a grin "D-Con Rat Poison". The third mouse finishes his drink, slams his glass on the table and starts to leave. The first mouse says, "Where do you think you're going?”
"Time to go home and chase the cat”
After a lady’s car had leaked motor oil on her cement driveway, she bought a large bag of cat litter to soak it up. It worked so well, that she went back to the store to get another bag to finish the job. The clerk remembered her. Looking thoughtfully at her purchase, he said, “Lady, if that were my cat, I’d put him outside!”
A college student challenged a senior citizen, saying it was impossible for their generation to understand his. “You grew up in a different world,” the student said. “Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers…” Taking advantage of a pause in the student’s litany, the geezer said, “You’re right. We didn’t have those things when we were young; so we invented them! What are you doing for the next generation??”
The economy is so bad that: The Mafia is laying off judges
The best answer to the question asked in an interview, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years' time?" . . . "In the mirror as always . . "
The photographer for a national magazine was assigned to get photos of a great forest fire. Smoke at the scene was too thick to get any good shots, so he frantically called his home office to hire a plane. "It will be waiting for you at the airport!" he was assured by his editor. As soon as he got to the small, rural airport, sure enough, a plane was warming up near the runway. He jumped in with his equipment and yelled, "Let's go! Let's go!" The pilot swung the plane into the wind and soon they were in the air. "Fly over the north side of the fire," said the photographer, "and make three or four low level passes." "Why?" asked the pilot. "Because I'm going to take pictures! I'm a photographer, and photographers take pictures!" said the photographer with great exasperation. After a long pause the pilot said, "You mean you're not the instructor?"
