Spare Change

• This 72,000 square-foot house is listed at $165 million, the highest ever asking price for an American residential property. It includes 41 bedrooms, 8 fireplaces, 29 bedrooms, 3 swimming pools, 22 foot arched ceilings and 1 disco. The house, featured in The Godfather and The Bodyguard, is from the 1920s and sold in 1947 for $120,000. With a view listed as "canyon, pool, treetop," it includes 6.25 acres in the vicinity of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and David and Victoria Beckham.

To put things in perspective:

• It would take an estimated 10 hours to quickly clean all of the bathrooms.
• Other things that cost $165 million: A Boeing 787 Dreamliner Passenger Jet and NASA's Mars Polar Lander.
• Half the world lives on under two dollars a day.
• Every second child lives in poverty and 1.4 million children die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

If you like this post, check out one of my older posts including a $14,000 diamond-studded tea bag here.

And by the way, thanks for your patience. I haven't posted recently because of finals week.

Sources: Dec 07 Reader's Digest, poverty facts

Square-y

Square watermelons were invented in 2001 by a Japanese farmer concerned about consumers not being able to fit the fruit into their fridge. There is no genetic changes in the watermelon, they are simply grown inside a box, and assume the box's shape. The square watermelons end up in the exact dimensions to fit comfortably into a Japanese refrigerator. In Japan they cost a bit more, however, at about $82, three times that of a normal watermelon. Recently, Tesco in the UK (a kind of UK WalMart) has started selling these for around £5, importing them from Brazil. And also recently, an agriculture and applied biotechnology student from Vietnam has produced square watermelons for the lunar New Year. During this time, watermelons are offered to ancestors. The ideal offering is a regular watermelon paired with a square one, as a square represents the earth and a circle represents the sun.
Source. Source.

Fido?!

Artist Karl-Friedrich Lentze is planning on opening the world's first brothel for dogs. Stationed in Berlin, the brothel will charge $32 and will include Lentze's Jack Russel Tarrier acting as the door-dog. Lentze sees it as art: "It's a form of satire that criticizes society. I used to paint and create sculptures, this is just the next step."

Other artistic endeavors of his include:

• He sued the Easter Bunny for causing addiction to chocolate. Lentze said: "The Easter Bunny is a sadistic and unscrupulous offender who preys on people's sweet tooth."
  
• He got permission from the Bonn city council to be buried with a biodegradable inflated sex doll.
• He applied for a patent for his devise to straighten bananas. He explained it as: "Depending on the degree of the curve, chunks will be cut out of the banana, which will then be bound back together using biologically safe bandages.
  

Source. Source. Source. Source.

ho-ha

Westaff, Australia's largest supplier of Santa Clauses, has instructed their Santas to say "ha, ha, ha" this Christmas. A former Santa employee reported that Westaff was concerned about Santa's traditional "ho, ho, ho" being derogatory to women. Says an anonymous Santa: "As far as I'm concerned, a hoe is something you dig the ground with."
Westaff has fended off these allegations by claiming that :"[I]n some cases the little kids can get a little bit scared of the deep ho, ho, hos." Bill Muehlenberg retorted with: "Potentially any big guy in a red suit with a white beard is scary but I don't think him saying 'ho ho ho' would damage a child's psyche."
Source.

Irony

In Houston, Texas, after passing a student-driving test, the driver crashed his car into the Texas Department of Public Safety.
source

What time is it?

don't play with your food

Apparently, there is a First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra. They play about 20-30 concerts a year and have 11 musicians, 1 video person and 1 sound technician. And yes, all of their instruments are made out of actual vegetables: "carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos." After the end of each performance, the vegetables are made into a soup and served to the audience.

Here is a video of a performance. Here is an audio clip. And here are pictures of their instruments.